


don't say it was only love

by angel_deux



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Abortion, One Shot Collection, Past Abortion, Romancing the Stone AU, Unplanned Pregnancy, You've Got Mail AU, basically this is the good time feelings collection, canon typical hand injuries in chapter 4 as well, chapter 4 is a bottle episode basically. they're stuck in a bunker lmao, definitely not because im having an extended panic attack, featuring romance novelist jaime and noble mercenary brienne, for no particular current events reason, mostly fluff but like with a smidge of angst, stable triad with some catelyn in chapter 10
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 39,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23174011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: A collection of fluffy one-shots to read if you're feeling stressed out or bored or whatever else.12. "Do you trust me?". Jaime and Brienne are roommates and friends with benefits, and Jaime has fallen in love.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 581
Kudos: 873





	1. high as hell, feeling fine

**Author's Note:**

> As with most of my fics lately, I joked about doing this on tumblr and then it turned into not-a-joke. As I hope for my work to finally wise up and keep me home for the next few weeks, I'm looking to write some of the fluffy one-shots I want to read about these two. These will probably be a bit shorter than my usual ones (though this one is at 3.7k, so maybe not THAT much shorter), and I hope to get them done quickly, so they won't be put through the editing wringer as much as my other stories. 
> 
> If you can think of any fluffy-with-a-hint-of-angst stories you want me to write, head over to angel-deux-writes on tumblr and send me a message! I've got some great ones waiting for me already, and I'm going to try and incorporate some older prompts into this collection as well, but I could always use more inspiration!

They shouldn’t let you keep your phone on you when you get your wisdom teeth out, right? Like, that should be a rule. Brienne knows there’s a whole genre of videos of kids getting out from under the drugs and saying wild stuff, but she’s not a kid, and her parents and older brother would never do that to her.

What they _will_ do, apparently, is let her keep her phone in her pocket in the recovery room. Which she doesn’t realize until the next morning, when she discovers that it’s dead and goes to recharge it only to find that she has thirty unread messages.

She’s still a _little_ high—she took her painkillers about a half hour before she realized the thing about the phone—but it’s nothing compared to how high she was yesterday, and so every text chain makes her cringe in horror and want to bury her phone in the backyard before moving to Essos or something.

The most recent message is from her best friend Catelyn, who texted her ten minutes ago asking if she’s feeling better. Brienne scrolls up through the thread in increasing horror, seeing the sappy declarations of forever friendship and literally the phrase “I would die for you, my lady”. At least Catelyn is nice about it, telling Brienne that she’s sweet and urging her to put down her phone and take a nap and reminding her not to text anyone else.

_Too late!_ High Brienne had written, almost gleefully, and in a way that fills Mostly Sober Brienne with prophetic dread.

Her message to her other best high school friend, Renly Baratheon, was all about her ill-advised crush on him in middle school. He, of course, showed no regard for her diminished state, asking a million questions and sending endless laughing crying emojis in reply to her overly precious answers.

And her college friends? Even worse. Her roommate Asha received a confession that one time Brienne walked in on her and her hookup and didn’t leave immediately out of sheer curiosity. Her favorite professor, Professor Goodwin, received a lengthy screed containing Brienne’s opinions about the _true_ history of Oathkeeper, which she’s never expressed in class (luckily, he seems enthusiastic about her ideas, and doesn’t seem to realize how out of her mind she was when she sent it). Hyle got a message politely informing him that Brienne _knows_ he’s only friends with her because of the bet, after which followed a weird fucking conversation in which Hyle owned up to it but admitted that he had grown to kinda like her anyway, and he wants to still be friends. Which, apparently, she agreed to. High Brienne doesn’t make the best choices.

It’s when she finally gets to her text chain with Elia Martell that the rest of them cease to matter, because the last message from Elia turns her blood to stone. Or vaporizes it, maybe, leaving her empty and lightheaded and reeling, like her body has decided to become a balloon and float away entirely.

**Elia:** I’m sure he’s just busy! Try not to worry. Jaime loves you too. I’m sure of it.

No. No, no, no. Of course she did this. _Of course she did this_. She scrolls past all the other messages—to her parents and Galladon, sappy messages of love; to her lab partner, a confession that she finds his enthusiasm for the subject frankly alarming; to Catelyn’s boyfriend, a reminder that she could probably beat him in a fight and wouldn’t hesitate to if she hears any more rumors about him cheating on her. All of those are plenty bad. But Jaime’s is worse, because Jaime’s is at the very bottom, because it looks like Jaime is the first person she texted.

And Jaime didn’t respond.

“Oh no, no, no,” she whispers aloud. She’s staring at what little she can see of her confession on the preview line. She’s afraid to click on it. She sent it at three in the afternoon the previous day, right after getting out of surgery. He’s had a whole day to respond, and he _hasn’t_. That means something, right? _Shit._ She should have known this was going to happen.

She clicks on it at last, resigned to her own humiliation. It’s multiple texts, because of course it is, because she’s always _such_ a considerate texter, only sending one message at a time. As short as possible so she doesn’t bother other people. But Drugged Brienne was, apparently, a different sort of creature. The opening text is literally just…an entire paragraph about his face.

_It’s really rude_ , the first line says _, to walk around with your face like that, like you don’t even realize how good it is, except of_ course _you do. You have mirrors! And you can probably feel your jaw, like I bet it rips holes in your shirts when you’re not careful putting them on. Someone else said that once. Asha maybe. It wasn’t me, but I remember it, and now I can’t stop noticing. Who has a jaw like that? And a face like that? And is nice? You don’t make any sense, Jaime. When you were an asshole THE WORLD MADE SENSE but it doesn’t anymore!!!!!_

With typos and misspellings and commas and semi-colons in places they definitely don’t belong, but that’s the gist of it, anyway.

The next one is _and your hair is definitely on purpose because I see you playing with it in the mirror that you have all the time, and I always want me to be doing it. I know you like it even if it’s me, because you ask sometimes and let me play with it, and I wish you’d ask more._

_Sometimes I think you know I’m in love with you and I think you do this stuff on purpose, like to make me fall even more in love with you. It must be nice to have someone in love with you even if you don’t love them back. Someone who would do anything for you._

_I didn’t mean to tell you that. And I’m high so none of this counts anyway._

_It would just be easier if you weren’t so easy to love._

_Or like you’re not easy to love. It’s actually really painful, but you know what I mean._

_Or maybe you don’t. You don’t seem like you love anybody. I mean like your family obviously, but you know what I mean._

_I don’t know, just shut up and stop looking at me, because it’s ridiculous. Goodnight._

That was _yesterday_. And he hasn’t responded.

Brienne groans and throws her phone across the room, where it disappears under her desk where it belongs. She’s such an idiot. Every time she sees Jaime, hangs out with Jaime, goes to class and spots Jaime waving at her from where he has inevitably saved her a seat, she’s barely hanging on to her restraint. Barely resisting telling him that she’s in love with him. Why didn’t she think about giving her phone to her dad until she could be sure that the danger had passed? In hindsight, it’s so _obvious_. Of course High Brienne’s first move was to text Jaime all about why she’s in love with him.

* * *

If anyone in her family notices that Brienne is sulky that day, they don’t mention it. They probably assume it’s just the drugs. She sits on the couch and sulks through several different sports games with her parents. She sulks through a movie her mother puts on while she’s folding laundry. She sulks through her dinner and through the movie they all watch afterward as a family. She sulks, and she drifts in and out, glad at least for the extra-strength painkillers that keep her from getting _too_ upset about it. By the end of the day, she’s actually feeling kind of optimistic.

So she said some stupid stuff while on painkillers. People do that all the time. If Jaime’s willing to pretend he didn’t receive the messages, she’s willing to pretend that she didn’t send them. Maybe he read the first one and then deleted the rest out of an abundance of honor because he knew whatever she was about to say would be unfiltered, drugged-up Brienne.

It doesn’t exactly seem _likely_ , since Jaime’s favorite mode of communication is teasing, but she convinces herself that this is different, that he’s just being a good friend, and that he never read her messages at all.

_They were on read_ , she remembers hazily, as she turns in to bed that night. _He read them_.

Well, fine. So he _opened_ them. That doesn’t mean he read them.

And even if he did. Even if he read every word, him not responding is…

Well.

He’s probably giving her a chance to decide what she wants to do. That’s what it is. He’s letting her decide if she wants to acknowledge it or not. He obviously doesn’t feel the same way. She knew that from the start. But he’s at least being a good enough friend to _pretend_ that he didn’t receive her confession. They can go back to normal. It’s good that she said it over text and not in person, because now she has the option to just…ignore what she said. Try to forget she said it. She should just delete the messages entirely so she never has to look at them again.

_That’s what I’ll do_ , she says, drifting off, finally able to sleep now that she has clearly solved this crisis. _In the morning_.

* * *

In the morning, she and her mother work together to clean up her room, air it out. She changes her sheets—well, she _tries_ to change her sheets, and then her mother has to laughingly help her finish the job when she can’t figure out what way the sheet should go on the bed. She collapses back into bed afterward, her energy sapped, and Galladon brings her breakfast on a tray and makes fun of her swollen cheeks, balancing out the Big Brother Kindness with something a little more standard. He also fetches her phone from where it’s been under the desk for a day, and he plugs it in and leaves it by her bedside even though she begs him to take it out of the room so she doesn’t make any more mistakes.

“Cat’s been texting me nonstop trying to get you to turn on your phone,” Gal replies on his way out. “She’s _your_ friend. You deal with her.”

Brienne grumbles as she eats her toast and sulks as she takes her medication and finally, finally looks at her phone. Cat has indeed been texting her almost nonstop to check on her, but she’s not the only one.

_Oh no,_ Brienne thinks. _Oh, Jaime_.

He’s called her three times. The latest message from him is just a string of question marks, and Brienne almost doesn’t want to click on it and see the rest, but she does anyway. There’s a wall of messages from him, one or two words at a time, because that’s how he texts; with no consideration for other people. The _one time_ she accidentally left her phone off silent in class was humiliating because he managed five texts before she finally managed to shut it up. She hasn’t taken it off silent since.

_What._

That’s the first message. Very Jaime.

_Holy shit_ is the second.

_Brienne are you high?_ A very charming third.

It goes on like that.

_Are you okay?_

_Brienne?_

_I just tried calling and you didn’t answer._

_If you’re freaked out please don’t be. I need to talk to you._

_I don’t want to text it._

_I mean you did but clearly you’re high._

_Okay I got in touch with Elia and she says you got your wisdom teeth out. Why didn’t you tell me?? I’d come visit._

_Smart idea getting it done during holiday break but it would have given me an excuse!_

_Brienne?????_

_No one has heard from you I’m getting worried._

_Tyrion and I went to visit our aunt and my phone ran out of battery please don’t be freaking out._

_I’m sorry I didn’t answer! I would have! Right away!!!_

_Are you okay?_

_Brienne please answer._

_Brienne seriously I love you too and you’re a fucking idiot if you’re not answering because you’re scared I don’t._

_Like._

_Of COURSE I LOVE YOU?? Are yOU KIDDING?_

_All of our friends!!! ALL OF THEM! Have been mocking! Me! For! Months!_

_Brienne._

_BRIENNE!!!_

_This is ridiculous. You’re freaking me out._

_I’m getting your address from Elia._

_Okay. I talked to your high school friend Cat and she’s going to get you to turn on your phone. I’m still driving to your house and hopefully you don’t murder me._

“Fuck, no, stop,” Brienne says aloud as she texts him.

**Brienne:** I’m fine. Don’t come here!

**Jaime:** FINALLY!

**Jaime:** And too late lol

**Jaime:** I mean I could turn around but I’ve already been driving for two hours. I’m almost there.

“You fucking idiot,” Brienne says aloud, pressing the phone against her forehead. She breathes in sharply, trying to calm her racing heart. Even the medication can’t chill her out this time. She’s not even sure who she’s talking about. Herself, probably. She’s the fucking idiot. He’s an idiot too. She can’t even _begin_ to parse what he said in his texts. It’s impossible.

**Brienne:** I’m still high.

**Jaime:** Do you want me to turn around?

He will, too. That’s the thing. He’ll be hurt, but he’ll turn around, and he’ll pretend _not_ to be hurt, and he’ll read it as her not _wanting_ him here, and then he’ll start wondering if her confession was just about being high, or he’ll start to worry that he read it wrong or something. High Brienne was a fucking menace, but she wasn’t wrong: it was easier when Jaime was just an asshole in a few of her classes and she didn’t know that he’s actually a really sweet guy underneath everything. A sweet, insecure guy who, despite his face and body, struggles with people accepting him. Struggles with believing them.

**Brienne:** No…

**Jaime:** okay I’m at the gas station like two streets away. I’ll be there soon. I’m sorry I didn’t think. If you don’t want me to come in I can yell at you from the driveway? Which window is yours?

**Brienne:** Just come to the door you animal.

She rushes to the bathroom, determines that her puffy cheeks are a lost cause, and finds her biggest hoodie and a scarf that she can use to pull up over her face. Her father spots her when she’s rushing into the living room, dressed in jeans instead of the pajama pants she’s been wearing for the past few days.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Jaime’s coming to visit,” she replies. Brienne’s mother makes some cooing noises from the kitchen, and Galladon laughs. “It’s not like that,” she says, even though it is.

“Considering he was freaking out on social media trying to get someone to give him our address…” Galladon points out from behind the relative safety of the kitchen door, and if Brienne was even a hair steadier on her feet, she would storm in and clock him.

Brienne’s mother bustles out of the kitchen, smiling, and immediately clucks her tongue in disapproval.

“You see each other every day. Surely he’s seen you in pajamas at some point.”

“ _Mum_.”

“Get back in your room, get back in bed, and I’ll send him up once he gets here.”

Which. Fine. Isn’t the worst idea. If the conversation gets too awkward, she can just pretend to fall asleep. She changes back into her pajama pants, opens the window for even _more_ fresh air, but she keeps the hoodie and scarf on. There’s no way he’s seeing her face swollen like this. She hides everything potentially embarrassing in the closet. The picture of the two of them that she keeps on her corkboard beside her bed. The stuffed lion that he gave her for Maiden’s Day last year. Actually anything stuffed or cutesy, because there are a lot of stuffed and cutesy things in her room, and she doesn’t want him to see any of it. She’s in _college_. And she’s…her. Big and strong and serious. People don’t look at her and think _cute._

Though her mother’s right. It’s not like her room at school is any less embarrassing. Her bed is covered in stupid stuffed animals, because her friends know she likes them. She has pictures of she and Jaime on her wall _there_. She has embarrassing posters and the kind of adorable stuff that people don’t expect a girl her size to like. Jaime teases her for it, but she can take it because she knows he likes it too. This shouldn’t be any different.

But it _is_ different. Of course it is. She reads his texts again, just to be sure, even though her head is starting to cloud from the painkillers sinking in. She’s starting to worry that she will be barely functional by the time Jaime arrives.

She hears him pulling up, in that expensive car he claims he hates but uses every opportunity to drive. She hears him idling in the driveway for a while before he finally turns off the car and exits it. She holds her phone desperately in her hands, but he doesn’t text her to tell her _I’m here_. Just strides up to her front door and rings the doorbell like a sociopath, or like a kid who grew up rich and polite and not socially awkward and self-conscious.

She can’t hear what her mother says to him. She can’t hear what he replies. But she’s annoyed just thinking about it, just knowing that he’s probably making great smalltalk with her parents when the one and only time she met _his_ , she made a fool of herself immediately by laughing at something his father said, assuming it was a joke, which it apparently was _not_.

She buries her phone under the covers when she hears footsteps on the stairs. She’s acutely embarrassed, suddenly, thinking of how small and ratty her house must look compared to his. How her beat-up car in the driveway will look parked next to his. It’s such a fucking horrible metaphor, but that’s what it is, right? When they go out together, people _already_ stare, wondering how the two of them possibly became friends. They probably don’t assume that Brienne and Jaime are a couple, the way they assume with Jaime and Elia, or Brienne and Hyle. If she gets together with Jaime, she’s in for months of that. People looking at her with surprise, or with a sneer, or with an incredulous scoff. Is she ready for that? Or is she being presumptuous? The doorknob turns. _Maybe he just meant love, like, as a friend_.

The door opens, and it’s just Jaime. Not her mother. Not her father. Not her brother. She’s weirdly relieved about that, even though she can feel how defensive she is, hunched in bed with her scarf pulled up around her face. Jaime laughs loudly.

“Tarth!” he exclaims, like he’s surprised to find her in her childhood bedroom. The childhood bedroom he’s standing in after driving for two hours from his own house. In the middle of holiday break. Claiming he loves her. “What are you doing? Get that off your face. You’re not _contagious_.”

“My face is puffy,” she says, muffled through the fabric, and he laughs again and closes the door behind him, flopping down on her bed the way he always does at school. Braced on one elbow next to her, way too close in her twin bed.

“Of course it is,” he says. “Remember the pictures I showed you of mine?”

He _had_ shown her, months ago. She remembers that now, the way he offered himself up for mocking so easily.

“You looked adorable,” she reminds him.

“Yeah, and I bet you do too,” he says. He’s smiling at her. Bright and uncomplicated and Jaime, but with a giddiness beneath everything else that makes him strange. Like he’s nervous and trying to hide it. It makes her want to be mad at him again, though she knows it isn’t fair. It isn’t his fault he’s so _much_. It isn’t his fault she wants him so badly. She sighs and pulls down her scarf, and his eyes crinkle up at the corners as he grins and pokes at her cheek. She ducks her head away and swats his hand, and he laughs at her. “I was right,” he says happily, and she only glares at him, feeling like a fool, feeling like she’s out of her element. Jaime kisses her on one swollen cheek and then sits up, leaving her feeling both like she has been hit and like she has been shot. Confused, she watches as he leaves the bed and sits in her desk chair, wheeling it closer.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“You just took your pills, your mom said,” Jaime tells her. “And I can see you’re like two seconds from naptime. So I’m gonna go downstairs and hang out with your parents and Gal. They asked me to stay over tonight and sleep on the couch. Tomorrow, your mom said, they’re gonna start weaning you off the strong stuff, so we can talk about this then.” He takes in a deep breath, and he’s so _serious_ , and so handsome, and Brienne can’t understand why he’s talking to her like this, like this is a very solemn moment, until he says, “but I want to say it now, before you fall asleep wondering: I _love_ you. Whether or not your drugs wear off and you realize you made a mistake, you should know it. I love you exactly the same way you said you love me. You’re my best friend, and it’s more than that, too.”

Brienne realizes that she’s smiling at him, and he smiles back, looking…relieved. _Relieved_. Jaime Lannister is relieved because she loves him. It still doesn’t make any sense, but she’s not going to argue about it. She’s too tired.

“I know,” he says, though she doesn’t remember saying anything. He’s laughing, so maybe she said that last part out loud. Whatever. He’s looking at her like she’s special. She could look at that all day.

He leans in and kisses her forehead. Lingers there. She wants to cry, a little, but she yawns instead. When he pulls away, he’s biting his lip, looking down at her. Giddy still. Like he can’t believe his luck.


	2. Small Bump

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2\. Jaime and Brienne hook up at a party to celebrate Tyrion's divorce. They stop hooking up after Margaery overhears some things that Jaime is saying about Brienne. And then Brienne notices The Bump.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was originally conceived (lol) for one of those tumblr memes where someone sent me a title and I had to come up with a fic. I revived it after receiving a few prompts about unplanned pregnancy! 
> 
> I am learning with this "short one-shot collection" that I don't, in fact, know what short means, and that I could probably be posting all of these as their own separate one-shots. but i might as well avoid cluttering the tag lmao, and for some reason the collection feels like less pressure than individual oneshots, so I'll keep doing that for now!

The first thing that happens is this:

Brienne hooks up with Jaime at a party that his brother is throwing to celebrate his divorce. It’s…kind of a weird situation, but basically the rundown is that Tyrion needed to find a wife in order to access the trust fund that his mother set up for all of her children before her death five years earlier. According to Sansa, it had something to do with keeping the money out of his father’s hands, through some legal shadiness that Brienne doesn’t quite follow. Tyrion and Sansa get married as a kind of business transaction, in order for Tyrion to get his hands on the money and for Sansa to get a cut. To meet the terms of the trust fund, they stay married for a year. The party is a measure of their success, a celebration of the divorce, and a chance for Tyrion to show off the new mansion he was able to buy. Lannisters don’t live like normal people. 

Brienne already knew Jaime before the party. They work out at the same gym together, and they became friendly after realizing their shared connection with that bonkers marriage. She’s not sure she’d call them _friends_ , but they text each other occasionally and see each other at the gym all the time. She used to think he was an arrogant jerk, and he used to think she was an uptight bore, but at some point those qualities became amusing quirks more than annoying dealbreakers.

At the party, they’re both slightly tipsy, and both loudly relieved that the marriage and divorce worked out better than they had assumed it would. They’re both naturally pessimistic, and most of their conversations over the past year included some commiseration about what a mistake it would turn out to be.

In their relief, in their tipsiness, in perhaps their shared awkwardness and the fact that they each only know the former couple and each other at the party, they end up spending a lot of time together, and before Brienne can figure out what’s happening, they end up locking the door to Tyrion’s guest bathroom and fucking furiously against the sink. Brienne has never done _anything_ like that before, and she spends the whole time alternating between disbelief that _Jaime Lannister_ , the most attractive man she’s ever seen, is so desperate to be inside her that he fumbles with everything he tries to do, and being absolutely sure that they’ll be caught and humiliated by someone bursting into the room.

They’re not caught. They’re not discovered. Jaime kisses her deeply after, in a way that Brienne frankly wasn’t expecting. He pushes her hair away from her face with one pleasure-clumsy hand and kisses her like he’s been dying for it. Sloppily but fully, in a way she’s never been kissed. She replays that kiss in her mind seemingly every fifteen minutes for the next three days until Jaime does it again, finding her in the back hallway of the gym as she’s on her way to the locker room.

* * *

The second thing that happens is this:

They keep doing it.

Against Brienne’s better judgement. Against her understanding of reality. Against every lesson she has ever learned about pretty men and the way they cannot look at her mismatched, ugly face and make her believe that they want her. Against _literally everything_ _she knows_ , she somehow does it again. And again. And again.

Around the fifth time, she stops disbelieving that he wants her, because it would be impossible not to know it. He’s always ready for her, always waiting for her, always looking for her in every room they’re in together. She still wouldn’t call it confidence, but it’s _something_ , the feeling she gets when she sees him watching her. She knows exactly where she stands with him. She goes to his apartment most nights, or he comes to hers, though she prefers his place instead. It feels more separate from herself. The big apartment. The bare walls and the plain furniture. There’s nothing about it that feels like a home. It’s a museum of wealth. An explanation of something she doesn’t quite understand about Jaime yet. She can be confident in a place like that. It’s at her own small house that it feels so odd. Everywhere he goes, everywhere he stands, he’s out of place. Sprawled on her ratty old comforter. Her faded couch. Looking at her old family photographs and laughing fondly about the gap in her teeth in that one picture from when she was a child. He’s too beautiful. Standing next to her, she can forget it sometimes, because she can’t see her own face. But her house is _her_. It’s an extension of her. And Jaime is too beautiful to belong in it.

It’s just sex. She tells herself that often. _It’s just sex. Don’t get too attached._ That Jaime wants her at all is exciting and fresh and new, and she’s grateful, as disgusting as that sounds. She wishes she could come up with a better word to describe it. _Grateful_. But she is.

* * *

The third thing that happens is this:

Brienne gets in too deep. It’s no surprise to anyone who knows her. Jaime wakes up one morning still in her bed, having stayed the entire night. He turns his head and looks at her, the sunlight from the window cutting perfectly across his face, and he smiles. _Sleepily_. She has this sinking realization that she’s never had a man smile at her like that across the pillows. This is the first time. _Him_. Jaime. And she’s glad.

He makes them pancakes. He laughs at himself. He seems to forget the very _concept_ of shirts. He’s just padding around barefoot in jeans slung low on his hips, his hair tousled and inviting, and Brienne can’t stop _staring_ at him.

Margaery and Sansa both coo over her later, when she has shown up at Sansa’s apartment to tell them everything. They’re kind and sympathetic and she knows they’re looking at each other behind her back and wondering what she’s complaining about when a man as hot as Jaime Lannister wants to fuck her and actually seems to like her, but she can’t explain. It was fine when it was only a hookup. It was fine when he was just a friend she liked to fuck. It’s different now that she has feelings for him. Different, and she doesn’t know how to face him again.

_Love_. She starts calling it love, at least in her mind, even though she tries to stop herself. Tries to unthink the word every time it pops up. She loves when he bites his lip. She loves when he’s nervous and seems off-balanced, waiting for whatever she has to say. She loves when he’s angry on her behalf, and she loves when he finds her amusing. It’s such a stupid, horrible word: _love_. Love? What does she know about love? It’s only sex, and she thinks she has fallen in love with him. She’s a child. She’s a fool. It can’t be love.

* * *

The fourth thing that happens is this:

Margaery overhears Jaime talking to his sister at some party that Tywin Lannister is throwing. Talking about how Tyrion’s idea was a good one. How he needs a wife to access his trust fund and has already found the perfect candidate. Someone who will marry him with no question. Someone he can divorce in a year and leave penniless, because she won’t think to ask for a pre-nup.

“I’m so sorry, Brienne,” Margaery says, and Brienne can’t think of anything but the way that Hyle Hunt had laughed when he revealed his part in that bet in high school.

_I told myself then that I would never be fooled again_ , she remembers, and she feels ashamed and humiliated and _angry_ with herself for failing to follow her own directives.

“Next time he calls, tell him to go fuck himself,” Sansa says.

“I’ll have to switch gyms,” Brienne finds herself saying, though it feels like she’s speaking from somewhere far away.

“Don’t _answer_ when he calls you,” Margaery scoffs. “You don’t owe him anything. You said it yourself: it was just a hookup. Ghost him.”

“What?” Brienne asks. Sansa is nodding.

“Margaery’s right. He’s using you. If it’s too difficult for you to talk to him about it, don’t.”

“Even if you think you _can_ do it, don’t! He doesn’t deserve it. You don’t owe him! The things he was saying to his sister…”

“All right,” Brienne says, waving Margaery off. Margaery can’t know, of course, because Brienne has never told _anyone_ , about what happened with the bet. She can’t know how similar it is. How similar it feels. How terrible it would be to hear it. Brienne knows the kinds of things men say about her. She can’t hear it from Jaime, even if it’s through the filter of a friend. “How should I do this?”

* * *

The fifth thing that happens is this:

Brienne ghosts Jaime.

She’s never ghosted anyone before. She’s never had anyone _to_ ghost! She feels like an asshole even though Margaery makes sure to remind her _daily_ that she doesn’t owe Jaime anything. She blocks his number. She deletes his texts. She starts working out at home instead of the gym. At least her bank account thanks her for that one. She even spends that weekend at Sansa’s apartment out of an abundance of caution, making sure that Jaime doesn’t try to show up at her home to talk to her. Margaery hypes her up, and Sansa supports her, and all through it she’s sure that Jaime’s going to pop up and confront her, demand to know what’s happened. But he doesn’t. Maybe somebody told him that she knows. Maybe he’s trying to give her space. Maybe he has no idea why she’s mad and just thinks that she ghosted him because she’s the sort of person who _does_ that. She doesn’t know. She wishes she didn’t feel so horrible about it. She wishes she was able to stop thinking about him.

Margaery tries to get her to go out and date a little bit. “Try and get over him by getting under someone else.” But it never feels like the right time. Ghosting starts to feel like a terrible decision, because it feels like there’s something that’s _unfinished_ about it. Not like she thinks she owes him an explanation, but like _she_ was owed the explanation and cheated herself out of it by being a coward. She would have liked to look him in the eye and tell him everything she knew. Would he have felt guilty? Or would he have been Hyle again. Laughing at her for ever believing that he _would_ want her? She doesn’t know. She can only imagine both scenarios, over and over again. A constant loop.

* * *

The sixth thing that happens is this:

She notices a small bump. It’s not her period, or lack thereof. It’s not tender breasts or abnormal fatigue or even morning sickness, the way it is for a lot of other women. She notices the bump first. A small swelling of her abdomen. Not much of one, but she’s proud of her body, and she’s very used to the way it looks, so seeing it in the mirror is surprising. She thinks maybe her at-home workouts haven’t been good enough, though she’s been feeling alright about them in the months since she quit the gym. She resolves to go running more. And then she’s halfway through the work day when the period thing hits her. She’s been so busy lately, she didn’t even notice. She goes scrambling for a calendar, and reality begins to sink in.

She goes to the maester to be sure, even though she _is_ sure, by the time it occurs to her. Mostly she goes because “ _a surprise pregnancy is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to me”_ is not a viable reason to completely freak out.

But a positive result _is_ , and Brienne is halfway to a major panic attack before she finally contacts Sansa. She goes to Sansa’s apartment, where Margaery is already waiting, like Brienne’s distress has summoned her. She’s earnestly worried and sweet, but she keeps asking Brienne _what do you want to do_? Which isn’t helping, because Brienne doesn’t _know_ what she wants to do. She wants to curl up in bed and cry. She wants to take the world’s longest nap. She wants to call Jaime and ask him what she’s supposed to do now because he went and got her pregnant before she ghosted him.

“I’m going to have to tell him,” she says, because it’s the honorable thing, and Margaery’s face scrunches up like she isn’t quite sure.

“Do you _want_ to tell him?” she asks. “Or do you only want to tell him because you think you have to?”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Brienne says, and Margaery smiles and rolls her eyes fondly.

“It’s your decision. But all three of us know Tywin Lannister enough to know that if he gets wind of his grandchild, you’re never going to have peace. If you want to keep it, unless you _want_ Jaime’s help…”

“I don’t,” Brienne decides. She thinks of Hyle again, and the bet. The sneering amusement of those horrible men and their horrible cruelties. No. She won’t put herself through that again. Margaery is looking at her with a sympathy that is hard to read and harder to take.

“All right,” Margaery says. “Then whatever you need, you have only to ask. We’re here for you, Brienne.”

* * *

The seventh thing that happens is this:

Brienne doesn’t tell Jaime. She doesn’t tell Tyrion. She swears Sansa to secrecy, even though Sansa and Tyrion are still friends. It’s not like she’s at risk of running into Jaime—she hasn’t so far, and she assumes he’s moved on to someone else in his wife hunting. Which is really just…the one thing that doesn’t make sense. Why _her_? With Hyle and Ed and Mark and the others, the _why_ was easy: they were trying to humiliate her. They were trying to make the big, ugly freak think that they were interested in her, only to pull the rug out from under her because they could. But Jaime wasn’t trying to do that. Jaime was trying to _marry her_. He could throw an engagement ring into a crowd at the beach and be almost guaranteed that the first person it hit in the head would say yes. Why didn’t he just _tell her_ what his plan was? They were friendly, before. Not friends, but friendly. If he wanted to pull the Tyrion scheme, he could have asked! Or he could have asked someone _else_. She would have been an odd choice all around. Surely there would be questions. Surely they would _assume_ he was only marrying her for the money. No one would believe it, otherwise!

Why her? It doesn’t make any sense. Why her?

It’s not even like he was moving particularly quickly. He didn’t fuck her and then immediately start talking about marriage. He didn’t even fuck her and then slowly start hinting about marriage. He fucked her, and fucked her, and fucked her, and he did a thousand other things besides. Things that she wouldn’t have expected. Things she wouldn’t have even known to ask for if he didn’t just _start doing them_. She wasn’t experienced enough to want for much, and then he showed her so many things on offer, and _why_ did he even bother?

It doesn’t make sense. It was cruelty for the sake of it, and it’s impossible to reconcile that with the image that she can’t get rid of. Jaime smiling at her across the pillows. Looking soft and radiating cozy warmth in her kitchen. Barefoot and wandering around her house like he was comfortable. It doesn’t make sense.

These things occur to her more and more as her pregnancy progresses, when she’s feeling emotional for no reason and tired constantly and always worrying about everything. She’s not actually all that frightened about raising a child on her own. Her father lives a few blocks away and will be over the moon about a grandchild, no matter what the situation with the father is. He’s retired and always willing to help, and she has so many friends who will join him. She decided a long time ago that she wouldn’t ever be able to be a mother, but now that she’s got the chance, she finds that she’s excited for it.

Sometimes she wonders if Jaime would like to know. But then she remembers Margaery’s warning, and she knows that Margaery was right. Tywin Lannister wouldn’t ever let this child be hers. It would be Jaime’s child. If she tried to fight that…well, everyone knows the kind of stuff that Tywin Lannister is willing to do to protect his legacy. He wouldn’t have any trouble taking her child away, by any means necessary. Jaime might even help him.

* * *

The eighth thing that happens, well. Brienne isn’t there for it. She doesn’t ever know exactly what happens. But it’s this:

Margaery didn’t know about the bet. She didn’t know about Brienne’s insecurities. She didn’t even know that Brienne was truly _in love_ with Jaime.

She saw, at best, a relationship that was doomed to fail.

She saw a man sleeping with a woman with no sort of commitment. She saw a man with a trust fund who needed a wife to access the money. She saw an attractive man keeping his hookups with an unattractive woman secret and she thought, genuinely thought, that there was no way to avoid Brienne having her heart broken but that there was at least one way to make sure that Margaery would get paid if that was the case.

It isn’t that Margaery Tyrell is “a bad person”, or even a particularly bad friend. She just misjudged. And when she found out that Brienne was pregnant, she resolved to make sure that her friend was taken care of, one way or another.

But Brienne says she doesn’t want Jaime involved, and so Margaery takes her at her word, and she moves ahead with her plan.

She bumps into Jaime Lannister in a place where she knows he’s going to be. He’s wary, a little brittle. She offers him a smile. Friendship. He asks about Brienne, in a distant, disinterested way that makes her blood boil. She doesn’t see the things he’s hiding behind his blank manner. She secures a lunch date. She knows she’ll have to move slowly with him, but she can do it. She is a Tyrell woman. Their hallmark is patience. The men are impetuous and impulsive and fiery, but their women have always been experts at playing the game.

* * *

The ninth thing that happens is this:

Brienne runs into Jaime when she’s five months pregnant.

There’s no disguising it, really. It’s not a very big bump, still, but she’s on her way back from her jog in the park, and she’s wearing a tank top, and it’s tight around her stomach. She doesn’t even see Jaime at first; she has her earbuds in, and she’s distracted thinking about work, and suddenly she sees him standing up from the outdoor table of one of the cafés she’s about to walk past. He looks…different. A beard and slightly longer hair. It’s a good look on him. He’s colorless, though, not the same golden tan she remembers. Pale with shock. She remembers her bump too late.

She draws attention to it then by trying to cover it with her hand. A reflex that does nothing but confirm for him what he already must have guessed. His mouth is open as if to speak, but he’s not saying anything.

Margaery stands up smoothly from the table he was sitting at.

“Jaime, sweetheart,” she says, warning.

Brienne turns around. She turns her music up. Margaery will stop him. She knows it. She doesn’t know why Margaery is here, with him. She doesn’t know anything except that she must get away. She must escape. She jogs her while lap back through the park, back around her block. She doesn’t stop jogging until she’s at her house. She’s sweating, panting. It’s a better workout than she’s gotten in months.

She sees him sitting on the front steps as she approaches. He’s wearing a suit. The paint of the railings is chipped and flaking. He still doesn’t look like he belongs. His hair is in his face. He’s disheveled, lost, like someone who just found their way back home after months away.

“Brienne,” he says, standing, like he thinks saying her name will keep her from running again. Like her exhaustion won’t do that on its own. “Please.”

She approaches with a tension and a wariness that disgusts her. She isn’t used to feeling afraid at her own home. She isn’t used to being afraid of anything. She hates being pregnant. Hates this feeling of vulnerability that it has awoken in her because she’s so scared of doing something wrong and messing it up before she’s even had a chance to begin.

She lets him into her house. She leaves him there, in the living room, among the possessions he doesn’t match. She takes a shower, and finally her mind awakens to the reality.

He knows. He’s in her house.

The vulnerability and the shock all are gone by the time she’s dressed and back out in the living room. Jaime’s still standing there, near the door, like he’s already ready to leave. She has a soft sweater on now, to better hide the pregnancy, but his eyes go to her middle immediately.

“You weren’t supposed to know,” she says. He gives a choked laugh at that, a disbelieving sound.

“You weren’t going to tell me?” he asks.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was my decision.”

“Of course it was your…Brienne, I would _never_ try to tell you what to do with your body. I wouldn’t.”

“That’s not what I…I meant it was my decision to keep the baby. I wanted it. I didn’t know what you wanted, so I just…”

“How _could_ you know? You disappeared on me. You stopped answering my texts. Stopped taking my calls. I even came by, and you never… _Brienne_.”

She has stopped looking at him. Staring instead at some point on his collarbone. He has unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, and she can see the dip of his skin. Can remember marking it with her tongue. Who knew there was such a thing as a good collarbone? Her eyes snap up to his when he says her name, and he’s looking at her with…exhaustion. Betrayal. Like he’s the injured party here.

“Margaery overheard you and your sister,” she says. Jaime shakes his head. Steps closer.

“ _Margaery_ thought that I was ashamed of you. That I was keeping you secret for my sake. She thought that I only wanted to fuck you, and she thought that if I was going to break your heart anyway, she might as well benefit.”

“No. Margaery is my _friend_.”

“She’s also a Tyrell. She’s a schemer, Brienne. It’s what she does. She wanted the money. The marriage.”

“She wouldn’t _do_ that.”

“Check your phone, Brienne,” Jaime says. He seemed tense at the beginning of this conversation, but he doesn’t seem tense now. He seems set. Steady. She’s the one with shaking hands. She goes to her bag where she left it on the counter. Messages from Margaery. She only has to read the first two.

It’s funny that she’s not even angry with Margaery. _It’s what she does_ , Jaime had said, and yes. Brienne knows that. Margaery has always played chess while the rest of the world can barely grasp the concept of checkers. She’s the kind who will do something absurd and then apologize later. Not the other way around. Brienne puts her phone back down and turns to face Jaime. He looks…hopeful. Desperate. It’s too much. “Oh,” she says again.

“I never said anything about marriage to my sister,” he says. “I barely _talk_ to my sister except what politeness dictates. You know that.”

“I know what you told me.”

“It was true. Brienne, I fucked you at that party because I _liked_ you. I kissed you because I had been wanting to kiss you. I don’t need the money. I don’t _want_ the money. Not the way Tyrion did. I can wait for it to be right. Tyrion couldn’t stand the thought of that money being out there and unavailable to him. That’s just how he is. I’m not like that. I thought you knew that.”

“I thought I did too, but Margaery…”

He still looks vaguely hurt, but he nods, and he runs his hand through his hair. Idle. Nervous.

“You disappeared,” he says.

“I know.”

“I understand why you did it.”

“I thought…”

“I _know_. But it. _Gods_ , Brienne. I thought we were…” He’s looking at her kind of helplessly, like he wants her to finish the sentence, but she can’t. She doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

“What?” she asks.

“In love,” he replies. She can feel her face crumbling. First out of incredulity, some kind of denial. Then it’s just…realization. He’s serious, isn’t he? He’s actually serious. He loved her.

“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

His face is still very motionless, very pained.

“Margaery said…she said you did. You loved me.”

Oh. That’s what he’s waiting for. She nods. She swallows. It still feels like a mistake, even though she thinks she must trust him, if she’s entertaining this at all.

“I did,” she says. “I thought. I thought it was just…a hookup. For you.”

“No,” he replies. Unnecessarily, she thinks.

“Oh,” she says again.

* * *

The tenth thing that happens is this:

They fall back into bed immediately.

Brienne thinks it will be a slow thing. A gradual, beautiful, _healing_ reigniting of trust. Something soft and gentle. He will go with her to her appointments for the baby. She will text him. Answer his calls. They’ll go on a few normal dates. Dates they never had.

Instead, he kisses her, and she kisses him back, and it’s like remembering something you had forgotten. A memory lost and then suddenly retrieved, every single bit of that part of your brain lighting up all at once. He is restrained in his passion, torn between treating her gently and unleashing all of it on her at once. It’s an odd contrast, and it’s one that drives her absolutely wild. Or maybe anything he did would have driven her wild, because he’s Jaime and hers and here, and because he loved her. He said it. He meant it.

Afterward, he lies beside her, his head pressed against her shoulder. He’s breathing hard, and the warmth on her skin is oddly soothing. She runs her hand across her stomach, the way she can’t stop doing now, and she sees him watching. She raises an eyebrow to tell him it’s all right. He reaches eagerly, jittery, like it’s something he’s been wanting to do. It makes her ache for some reason to see it. His fingers brush across her skin with a reverence she didn’t know he was capable of. He’s smiling at her stomach. Hopeful.

* * *

The eleventh thing that happens is this:

The announcement of Margaery Tyrell’s engagement to Cersei Lannister is made three days before the birth of Brienne and Jaime’s baby.


	3. You've Got Mail, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 3 - a You've Got Mail AU where Jaime and Brienne are both teachers at the same high school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone prompted me a You've Got Mail AU where they're co-workers, and someone ELSE prompted me a You've Got Mail AU in high school, so...this is what I went with. I'll probably write a follow-up to this, but as I started getting into it, I realized this would end up being pretty long if I covered the entire story in one one-shot. So I'll do little bits of it for now, threaded throughout the other one-shots! 
> 
> Also I've just accepted that this collection doesn't have any naming conventions, and we're just going to have to roll with that for now

**Oathkeeper:** Are you busy?

Jaime looks out at his classroom. None of his students are paying him any attention. Most of them are still working on the test, and those who have already turned them in are either napping, pretending not to be sneaking looks at their phones, or doodling.

**WidowsWail:** could chat. whats up?

Oathkeeper doesn’t answer for what feels like forever. She has this deliberate way of messaging that always makes him grin. Everything spelled correctly. She’s so careful with her meanings. He can imagine her typing and deleting and typing and deleting until she’s managed to get her point across exactly as she means for it to sound. It’s adorable.

**Oathkeeper:** I was recommended a documentary from a Vaes Dothrak historical society. It’s in Dothraki, but I found a dubbed copy. It’s about the last Targaryen. But they apparently have some good information about our favorite duo! I was thinking a movie night?

**WidowsWail:** ABSOLUTELY! Ur my hero oathkeeper! Ive been wanting to watch that!

**Oathkeeper:** :) I thought you might like that! The usual time?

**WidowsWail:** u got it!

**Oathkeeper:** I’ll dropbox you the copy!

**WidowsWail:** cant wait! Hows ur day going?

One of the students comes up to hand in his test, catching Jaime on his phone. Luckily, it’s just Sam Tarly, the biggest teacher’s pet in Westeros, and he doesn’t make a big deal about it. Just offers an odd wink as he hands his test over before shuffling away, looking already-humiliated by the choice. Jaime chuckles, his earlier black mood already improving. There’s this little sparkle of feeling that fills his chest every time he talks to Oathkeeper. It’s not just their conversations. It’s just something about how considerate and kind she is. She makes allowances for his dyslexia without making a big deal about it. She always shows him that she wants to spend time with him—well, virtual time, but same thing—rather than leaving him guessing or fearing that he’s said or done something wrong. She’s the perfect woman.

Too bad he’s never met her.

* * *

It started because of a bullying incident at the school. A few of the teachers got really involved in the response, and they started pilot-testing a few anti-bullying programs. The head of the history department, Catelyn Stark, pulled Jaime in on a few of them, trying to get his opinion as a fellow “older teacher”—a fact that still makes him sulk a bit when he remembers it. Most of the programs were a bust, and in the end they settled on doing a terrible informational assembly that the kids all hated, since it was the cheapest option, but Jaime found himself intrigued by the app. It’s a fairly simple concept: an app for anonymous chats with people in your area. It involves filling out a survey about your age, interests, and important facts, and then makes the attempt to match each user with an appropriate buddy to chat with. It isn’t necessarily a dating app, though Jaime is sure it has been used as one in the past. Its main purpose is to develop friendships, which is something Jaime has been sorely lacking since both his siblings moved out of town.

Mel, the art teacher behind the majority of the anti-bullying push, knew the designer and had some grand idea about reworking it so that students could only chat within the school system. The goal would be to foster better understanding between the students by allowing them to speak anonymously with one another about their feelings and experiences, without worrying about being judged or mocked for it. Mel was convinced that it would teach them empathy. It probably wouldn’t done anything but allow the worst of the offenders to be dickheads while anonymous, but they didn’t have the budget for it anyway, so it was a bust before it even started.

Jaime, intrigued enough to start testing as soon as the idea was proposed, had already gone through five people before Mel revealed the budgetary constraints and announced that they could stop. The last of those five was Oathkeeper, and he has talked to her every day since.

He doesn’t know Oathkeeper’s name. He doesn’t know where she lives. He knows she’s a teacher, because that was one of the things he filled out in his profile, and she chose him to talk to for that reason—and because an Oathkeeper could not resist matching with a WidowsWail. They both have hard-ons for ancient history. They both seem to have trouble dating and making friends. They both make bad first impressions but much better lasting ones. She’s more wary about meeting in real life than he is. She was dating someone when they first started talking, but he knows she isn’t anymore, and he has to struggle every day with not asking her about it. He knows she’s quite a bit younger than him, and he knows that it doesn’t bother her; she teases him sometimes about being over forty, but never in a way that makes him feel like she’s truly mocking.

Nothing he learns about her is enough. He always wants more. It used to be that he would end their chats feeling satisfied, feeling like he had finally made a true, real friend. Feeling like it was a good thing that they didn’t know each other in real life, because people in real life always disappointed him, or were disappointed _by_ him. But the more they talked, the more he wanted, and lately he ends their chats feeling a skittering disappointment that they have to end their chats at all.

He thinks she feels the same way, but he’s not really sure _how_ to ask for more. He’s not used to moving quickly with people. He’s not used to moving anywhere with people at all. He long ago gave up on finding someone to love. He saw shitty enough examples of it all through his adult life, between his siblings’ marriages and his aunts and uncles and cousins. He used to idealize love, but he thought that had been drilled out of him a long time ago.

It’s not that he loves her. That would be absurd. He doesn’t know Oathkeeper. He doesn’t know her name, or her hobbies, or her family, or anything about her that isn’t information she has voluntarily offered. But his conversations with her _remind_ him of what he wanted from love when he was young enough to think he’d find it. The kind of love he always hoped and assumed he would one day have. If he ever met her, he’s so sure. He’s so sure he would love her.

* * *

After class, he’s in a particularly good mood, waiting for Oathkeeper’s reply. He heads for the teacher’s lounge briefly to grab another cup of coffee, and his good mood sours as he sees who’s standing at the coffee maker.

Brienne Tarth.

The new gym teacher is the kind of person that always makes Jaime’s blood boil. She makes assumptions about him that have nothing to do with _him_ and everything to do with _her_. She looks at him like he’s something she just scraped off the bottom of her shoe. And the worst part is that everyone else loves her. The students, the other teachers. No matter how much she looks down on some of them from that very high horse she’s perched on, everyone thinks she’s so honorable and wonderful and great.

Well, not Jaime. He respects her as a fellow educator, and he admires her sense of honor even though he thinks she’s too naïve. But he also thinks she’s a terrible, judgmental bore, and he has had no trouble telling her so on numerous occasions, just as she has no trouble accusing him of being an empty-headed rich boy who’s too cynical to be a good educator.

They don’t get along.

“Morning, Tarth,” he says, trying not to grit his teeth as he smiles his most winning smile at her. He can see Brienne’s shoulders hitch up slightly in annoyance, and she turns over her shoulder to pretend she’s not glaring at him.

“Lannister,” she says.

“I thought you didn’t drink coffee. I thought you said it was…what was it, again? A step away from nicotine consumption? An unhealthy crutch that we shouldn’t rely on as teachers?”

“I had a difficult evening,” Brienne mutters, refusing to look at him.

“Well, I’ve had a difficult morning, so if you’re done?”

Pleased when she moves aside without further comment, Jaime goes about making his coffee. And he hates it, because he always starts to feel _bad_. She really did say that thing about the coffee. She really does look down on people like him who need it to function. She really does think she’s better than all of them because her body’s almost fifteen years younger than his and she doesn’t understand what age does to a person even if said person still looks as good as he does. It’s not like he’s been snarky to her for no reason, and it’s not like she can’t snark back with the best of them. But it’s… _guilt_. He feels guilt. It’s so absurd.

“Well?” he finds himself asking. “What happened with your difficult evening? Anything I can help you with?”

She looks at him. He can tell, though he’s not looking back at her. He can imagine the quizzical, confused expression on her face.

“No. Thank you,” she finally says, like it physically costs her an effort to be polite.

“Suit yourself,” he says. He heads for the door, sipping his coffee loudly, even though it’s far too hot to drink comfortably, because he can’t miss the final opportunity to annoy her a bit more. He still feels off-balanced by their conversation, but he doesn’t have time to think about it now. She’s got plenty of friends on the staff. She’ll welcome _their_ help far more easily than she will welcome his.

He checks his phone when he gets back to his desk. Still no response from Oathkeeper. Damn. Well, he can wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is I think the shortest thing I've ever posted for JB, and I'm extremely proud of myself fyi


	4. I'll do my best with the time that's left

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 4 - In the middle of a crisis, Brienne finds herself locked in a bunker with a single other occupant - her ex-boyfriend, Jaime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright, so I know I said these would all be fluffy, but this one kind of isn't? It's still got a hopeful feeling to it, I think, despite...whatever crisis is going on. I wanted them trapped in one place to talk about their past, but I also didn't want it to be quarantine-related, so I went with "vague government overthrow". So...ymmv on this one. 
> 
> ALSO: WARNING!!   
> A past abortion is mentioned and briefly discussed. If this isn't your cup of tea, just don't read it. I'm also not super interested in hearing about how you don't think Brienne ever would, or you're anti-abortion, or whatever else. Just don't read it! I cannot stress that enough!

There are probably worse places in the world to be stuck during a government overthrow, but Brienne can’t think of any.

She paces again, checks the door. It’s thick inches of steel, and she knows it won’t open unless she tells it to, but she can’t seem to help it. She can hear the muffled sounds of chaos above them, but it’s quiet in the bunker. Quiet, hidden. That’s the whole point. Only three people in the world know the bunker is even here, according to Jaime. Four, now, she supposes. Assuming the other two are still alive.

Jaime is sitting back against the wall, breathing shallowly. He’s the bunker’s only other occupant. She’s trying not to think about it. His arm is wrapped in dirty bandages, and she knows she should try and clean the wound, but she can’t go near him yet. The events of the past two days are impossible, and trying to order them in her mind has rendered her useless. She remembers only flashes. The blood that bloomed on Catelyn Stark’s chest. Her dying request that Brienne find and protect her daughters. Robb being ripped away as Brienne tried to fight their attackers. Sansa screaming, Theon shouting. Gunfire and explosions and the screech of metal on metal. The pain of the beating she took, and the pain of watching Jaime turn himself in to stop it. Just flashes. She closes her eyes, and she presses her forehead against the cool metal of the door. She can _feel_ the chaos this way. The way it rumbles overhead, continuing even though she’s no longer there. Where are the girls now? She has failed them. Locked herself away here.

_Jaime needed me_ , she remembers. _The girls didn’t_.

The girls escaped. She saw them with Theon, up the street, running. She tells herself that over and over, though she’s starting to think that there’s no such thing as _escape_ anymore. Only delaying. Whoever’s behind the attacks of the past few days, they’re winning.

If her experiences have been bad, Jaime’s have been worse. She won’t soon forget the sight of his hand being pulverized in the middle of an already-brutal beating. She won’t soon forget the way he screamed when the rest of it was hacked off. When they were together, years ago…

No. She won’t think of that.

(When they were together, years ago, he was always sharp, brilliant, glittering. He was never lost or scared. He only rarely let her see his pain. That was half the problem.)

She can feel him watching her. Or maybe it’s just an assumption that he would watch her as she stands against the door with her head bowed. She’s the only thing _to_ watch. She remembers the way he looked, collapsing against the pillar outside that building, sliding down it, losing strength until she appeared through the smoke and pulled him up. He’d looked at her like she was a ghost, or some kind of angel, returning to save him. She had hated him for it. Hated him because the sight of him suffering still brought her so much pain, such a punch in the gut, like that love she once had for him has been hiding beneath the surface for years and only needed a nudge to flare back to life. A fire dying, renewed by a single poked ember.

She turns and looks at him. He’s sprawled on one of the bunker’s two beds. His head is back against the wall. There’s sweat on his neck and his face, and his hair clings in damp clumps to his greying skin. He looks awful. She goes to the back of the bunker and flings open one of the cartons of supplies that someone has kept stocked. It’s food, tablets to decontaminate the water. The next carton has bandages and sheets and some soft, neutral-colored clothing, like prison jumpsuits. The third has first aid. Medications. She reads the labels of a few until she finds an antibiotic that she thinks will work, and then she goes to him.

His eyes follow her everywhere. Silently. He used the last of his strength to get them here. To pull her away from the fleeing Stark girls and save her life. He’d been desperate, begging her, a side of him she’d never seen, and maybe it was the shock of it that brought her here at all. Turned off her defenses until she was already locked safely beneath the Red Keep.

When she’s kneeling in front of him, he suddenly looks away, bothered by her eyes on him. Pretending to sulk like a schoolboy. A pronounced version of the irritated avoidance he has performed every time he’s seen her in Catelyn Stark’s presence since she started working for the senator two years ago. Jaime doesn’t usually do _wounded_. Or at least he didn’t, when Brienne knew him before. He’d been angry the first time she showed up in Kings Landing with Catelyn. Impersonal and cold, but she knew him enough to know what that meant. She can see the wounds that run deeper, now. Red and inflamed behind the shimmering gold veneer that he keeps over everything. She wonders if they’ve been there all this time and it’s only now that he’s been so badly hurt that she can see them.

“What’s the point?” he asks. His voice is rough, rocks tumbling over one another. She’ll get him some water, next.

“The point is surviving,” she says, and he snorts and pulls his arm away when she tries to touch it, like an injured dog. She’s half surprised he doesn’t snap at her, try to bite her.

“I’m dying,” he says.

“Yes, and I’m trying to prevent that.”

“ _Why_?” he asks, and she’s taken aback by the force of it. She physically reels. She isn’t used to dealing with Jaime like this. Jaime is—was—golden. Everything golden. A shiny, pretty object. Polite and composed and only simmering beneath the surface, where no one could see. She had loved the bits of him that she thought she was spying beneath the gilded sheen, like there were parts of him that existed only for her, but those hadn’t been real, in the end. He’d been gold through and through. She had been so sure.

She can’t find the gold now. His eyes are sunken in. She remembers the sound of his screams, the sobbing way they’d trailed off, the way they made her stomach hurt, physically hurt, the way they made her realize that there is still some part of her that’s that foolish undergrad who fell in love with a beautiful boy on her floor in her dorm and never learned to keep her feelings hidden. He’s looking at her like she’s broken him. Like _she’s_ the one who held him down. The one who beat him half to death with the butts of their guns. Maybe she was; he only revealed his hiding place because of her.

“Why did you save me?” she asks, turning the question on him. His anger swells, almost bursts, but fades in the end. He seems…small. Hunched in on himself. Still holding his arm away from her, against his chest. If she was younger, she would have reached out for it anyway. Taken it. She would have felt like she had the right.

“What?” he asks.

“Why did you save me?”

“I didn’t.”

“You could have gotten away. You were well hidden. You could have gone out the window. You could have been safe. But you came back.”

He’s staring at her like she’s not making any sense, and for a moment it makes her wonder: _am_ I making sense? _Did_ he come back for me? Did I just imagine it?

Then, “of course I came back.” He’s looking up at her like he can’t believe her. “I’m not the one who fucking left in the first place.”

This time when she reels, she stands up from her crouch beside the bed. She stalks across the bunker. If she wasn’t stuck here, she would _leave_. Running is always the way she prefers to deal with things like this, as he well knows. Running and avoidance and pretending to herself that she doesn’t feel the things she feels. She hears Jaime laugh behind her. Sarcastic and bitter and brutal. Stronger than he was a moment ago.

“You can’t run now,” he says. She thinks it’s meant to sound smug, certain, but instead it sounds like a warning. A plea. She turns back and looks at him. He still looks too small. Too faded. Maybe he _is_ dying. She remembers the first time he kissed her, out behind the science building. They’d been trying to break in in the middle of a snowstorm for some reason she can’t remember. He was laughing at her while she tried to convince him that they were going to get caught, get in trouble. He was standing up on her shoulders to try and pry open one of the second floor windows, and then he gave up, made her put him down, and pulled her into a searing kiss that she still, to this day, can’t believe was real. More than any of the thousands of kisses that followed, that one lingers.

“I saved your life,” she says. He snorts, and there’s something idle and faded about it that makes her worry. His eyes flutter almost shut, then open again. Even watching him being beaten, even watching that man take his hand, she wasn’t so afraid for him. _He could die_. She realizes it suddenly, and it overwhelms her. _Jaime could die_.

He can’t die. He’s a constant presence. A thorn in her side. A reminder of everything she gave up for him. He was sharp and glittering and beautiful in college, when they fell in love even though it didn’t make sense. He was sharp and glittering and beautiful after, when they got their first apartment, when she daydreamed of marriage, when she closed her eyes and imagined them ten years down the road. Twenty.

He was sharp when she left. Beautiful, too, but not glittering any longer. Like she had rubbed some of the sheen off him and it took him a while to get it back. But he _had_ gotten it back. She’d seen him in interviews. On television. The talking heads named him as the possible frontrunner for the next president of Westeros, and she watched and followed his policies and knew that she had made the right decision.

_He will be president one day_ , Tyrion had said. _But not if you’re his wife._

“You saved my life,” Jaime says, mocking even as his voice grows quieter, weaker. “Am I supposed to thank you for that?”

“No. You’re supposed to fight. To stay alive.”

“For what?” he murmurs. He’s fading even more. Brienne feels a jolt of panic. She goes to her knees beside him, grabs his face. Shakes it. He glares at her through eyes that are still half-lidded, swimming with pain. He sobs, quite unexpectedly. The tension bursting. All his pain let out, acknowledged, not ignored or buried any longer. She pulls his head down against her shoulder. She remembers doing the same thing when his mother died of cancer, their first year out of college. She remembers holding him just like this. She had been so shocked to see him cry. She’s no less shocked now. She wraps her arms around him. Holds him tighter.

* * *

Jaime doesn’t die.

For a few days, he’s nearly delirious with fever. He keeps bringing up things she had almost forgotten.

_Remember when we walked to that graveyard and you held my hand?_

_Remember when we found that stray cat and tried to keep it, but it ran away?_

_Remember when you bought that hideous lamp?_

Things that she would not have said were in her memory at all anymore, but which come back to her when he speaks the words. He looks at her desperately every time, as if he needs confirmation that he’s not making it up. That it was real. She nods and mops his brow and feeds him canned broth and water, and she tries not to worry. The chaos continues up above. She can hear it whenever there’s a quiet moment. Sometimes she fools herself into thinking it has grown quieter. She knows they’re going to have to leave this bunker eventually, but she can’t leave him behind. He’ll die on his own, and she can’t let him. Especially not when he keeps reminding her.

_Remember when your dad took me fishing?_

_Remember when you found that dress at that secondhand shop?_

_Remember when you taught me how to make real coffee?_

His voice is laced with pain, and after the third day she realizes it’s not just physical, and it tears at the locked-away part of her heart in which she has nursed her greatest fear and her greatest hope: that Jaime did not get over her as quickly as she thought he would. As quickly as Tyrion had assured her he would. Every year that went by without a Tywin-Lannister-approved wife by Jaime’s side, she hoped. She felt guilty. She felt _right_. Savagely right, in the way that a person can feel victorious when they still have lost. The power of _I knew it_ , even as you watch your world crumble.

Finally, one morning, when the sounds outside _do_ come less frequently, when the world doesn’t shake quite as much, Jaime says, “remember when you left?”

He is more awake than he has been in days. More whole. There’s a stubborn tilt to his chin that makes her want to laugh and cry at once, because sometimes he looks so much like he did. It’s been years since he was hers, and he has aged and grown more beautiful somehow while she looks more severe, more worn, more _ugly_ and _beastly_ and _out of place_. Everyone always assumed that Brienne was Catelyn’s bodyguard, not her assistant, and it made sense. She couldn’t even be annoyed. She has grown too. She’s stronger than she was. She broke her own heart because she thought it was the right thing to do, and it did not make her brittle or cruel, but it _did_ make her harder. And yet when Jaime looks at her like that, accusing and damning like that, she’s a girl again. Eighteen. Twenty. Twenty-two. Breathless in the face of Jaime’s hurt.

“I do,” she says, like she has said for all of Jaime’s other remembrances. He’s not as feverish as he was. He’s not rambling, delusional. He knows exactly what he’s saying. She supposes she should be glad that she had a few days to prepare.

“You said you didn’t love me anymore.”

“I didn’t,” she starts. Stops. She remembers saying _it’s not working. I can’t spend the rest of my life like this_. She remembers the way he’d said, so desperately, _forget it, then! I’ll do something else! I don’t need it!_ So willing to throw away everything he’d worked for for her. It was too much. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she finishes, finally. Jaime is looking at her. There’s reproach there, hidden behind blankness that she doesn’t believe. If he was as blank as he looks, he wouldn’t have bothered bringing it up.

“What did you mean, then?”

“You wouldn’t have gotten half as far as you did if I was your wife,” she says. It’s snappish, harder than she meant it. Jaime stares at her.

“What?” he breathes. She doesn’t want to answer. She does anyway. She has kept this inside her for years. More than a decade spent burying her reasons. She can’t do it anymore.

“All your life, you said, you wanted to go into politics. Like your dad, but the _opposite_ of your dad. So you could help people.”

“I _know_ what I said! What does that have to do with us?”

“I,” she says. She remembers the way Tyrion laid his papers down on the table in front of her. Showing her the data. The graphs.

_For all we pretend to be an uplifted society, the numbers just aren’t there if any of this comes out_ , Tyrion had said. Apologetic and kind.

As the years have passed, Brienne has had time to come to terms with her choices. She thinks she could have made better ones. She thinks she could have been more upfront with Jaime. _Tell_ him about his brother’s visit, even if it would have driven a wedge. She looks back on it now and she sees a terrified girl just out of school who never understood quite why her boyfriend loved her, and who saw a way to make things a little less confusing. She chose clarity over him. A world where things made sense over him. But it wasn’t just that. She chose what he wanted over what _she_ wanted. He would have given it all up, if she had told him. But she couldn’t let him. He would be a good president one day. He would help so many people. All she had to do was leave.

It seemed like a noble sacrifice at the time. Now it just seems like the panicked choice of a girl who knew too little and had no idea how to fight for what she wanted.

“Brienne,” he says, waiting. She sits down on the bed across from his. She looks down at her hands.

“Tyrion,” she says. “Came to see me.” She looks up at him, and she sees that already he looks as if he has been punched. They were close back then, Jaime and Tyrion. Close enough that Brienne didn’t think there was any possibility that Tyrion would want anything but the best for Jaime. She knows better now, but she didn’t then. She was so young. “He showed me…all sorts of stuff. All these data that his team had gathered about the future trajectory of your career. It was what you wanted. More than anything.”

“Brienne. What did he _say_?”

“He said that I was a hindrance,” Brienne grinds out, looking back down at her hands, refusing to meet his eyes for this. It was always a point of contention when they were dating, the fact that she couldn’t let go of their disparate looks. Jaime could only say _it doesn’t matter to me_ so many times before he started to get annoyed that she didn’t believe him. “With my size and my appearance…if we got married, you would be a laughingstock. And I would be too. And if we _weren’t_ married, that would be even worse for you. This country is still so fucking backward. Even the fact that we were living together without being married for so long would be a hit. And…if it ever got out that I’d had an abortion.” She finally looks at him, meets his eyes, because he _knows_ this part is true. She’d mentioned it, even all the way back then. _It doesn’t matter_ , he’d said, but there was a part of her that was convinced he was lying. That he would resent her if anyone ever found out.

They were college sophomores, terrified and feeling like they’d both fucked up irreparably. She had never been so irresponsible, and he had never done anything that wasn’t planned by his father to help his future political career.

It was the right choice, and Brienne has never regretted it, even when Tyrion was looking her in the eye and telling her that it could ruin Jaime’s political hopes if the truth ever came out. It hadn’t seemed like a threat at the time. It had seemed like a friendly warning. She reacted as if it was a threat anyway, and she made her decision.

The truth was that she had already been looking for an excuse to run.

“Brienne,” Jaime’s saying, and there’s something tearing at the edges of him, making him seem less sick and yet less present than he’s been in days. “I wanted _you_ more than anything.”

“I think I know that now,” she admits. It’s still hard to say. It still makes so little sense. “But I thought…I couldn’t figure out _why_.”

Jaime sighs and rests his head back against the wall of the bunker. He closes his eyes.

“I thought you hated me for it,” he says.

“For what?”

“All of it. The politics. The carefulness. The way I always talked about how things would _look_. I thought you finally got tired of it.”

“I was always tired of it,” she tries to joke, but that only seems to deflate him further.

“I wasn’t worth the fuss,” he says.

She realizes suddenly that she has forgotten. Or purposely scrubbed him clean in her memory of all the things she loved. Built him up in her mind like he has always been the untouchable golden god he presents as on television and in interviews and on every magazine cover. Gilded and glittering and _sharp_. It was easier to remember him that way. But there was always something else. Something he didn’t want anyone to notice, especially her. But she _had_. She just forgot. Made herself forget, maybe. The way he talked about his father’s distance and his sister’s ambitions and his brother’s drive. The way he talked about himself not as a person but as a product of his father’s plans. The way he looked to her for assurance more than she had expected, like he wanted to hear her say that he had done the right thing. Made the right choices. Was _good_.

“I never said that,” she says.

“No. You didn’t have to. Tyrion said it for you.” Jaime smiles a little at Brienne’s incredulous stare. “I wanted to go after you. I wanted to quit everything. Give up everything. Find something else to do with my life. Tyrion convinced me not to. There was nothing in me except what my father had made of me, and it wasn’t enough for you. Whatever else there was, that wouldn’t have been enough, either. And then you showed up with Catelyn Stark, and I realized that it wasn’t the politics at all. It was just me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Well. So you say.”

“Self-pitying is a new look on you,” she snaps, because she can’t take it anymore. Jaime only laughs.

“As if you would know. Ask Tyrion, if you ever see him again. I’ve been quite self-pitying since you left.”

Brienne stands up and paces to the door again. It almost seems worth it, to open it and escape into the fight. At least she can do something there. Against Jaime, she doesn’t have a chance. She can’t stop remembering the way he looked at her when she told him she was leaving. Her bags all packed, the apartment stripped clean of any evidence of her. Jaime’s expression had been hard and cold, and she had been fooled. Now it seems in her memory she can see the desperate hurt in his eyes that she didn’t notice before.

“Brienne,” he tries.

“This isn’t the time.”

“It might be the _only_ time. Brienne, please. Look at me.”

She does. He’s still a bit gray, but getting better. He still holds his arm to his chest like a wounded animal. Hunched on the bed. He looks terrible. He looks in pain. And yet suddenly he’s not Jaime Lannister, Senator and Presidential Hopeful. He’s Jaime again. Her Jaime. She was a fool to think he’d ever stopped.

She sighs, and she moves across the bunker, and she sits on the bed beside him. He props himself up, straightens his posture, looks up at her with a quivering kind of hope that drives a chisel straight into the stony outer covering that she has molded around her too-soft heart. She reaches for him, brushes his hair away from his forehead. He closes his eyes and leans into the touch, and she cannot help it. She presses her forehead against his. She can hear his shuddering breathing. The relief in the sound. It matches her own.

“It won’t be the only time,” she says. She pulls back and looks at him. Firm. Wavering only slightly. “You’re going to survive this.”

Jaime smiles at her, just a bit. Soft. Too close. Too close especially now that she can see him so much clearer.

“If you say so,” he says. He licks his lips. She knows he’s doing it on purpose. She kisses him anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is from Monster by Mumford and Sons, because of course it is.


	5. Brienne the Bodyguard, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 5 - Jaime has been running through bodyguards since his family started receiving threats against his life. When it's his sister's turn to hire the next one, she makes sure to choose someone Jaime won't want to drive away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I would take a longer break after finishing HCM, but then this was so close to being done, so I figured I'd finish it off! 
> 
> I was prompted on tumblr: Can we have rich, spoiled Jaime Lannister in his 30s being protected by bodyguard!Brienne because his father insists after an attack? I don't know about the teeny bit of angst part but this universe would have so much potential.*_*
> 
> And I completely agree, so I decided to make it another multi-part one, like the You've Got Mail one! This universe will feature healthy Lannister sibling dynamics, executive MILF Cersei, and a lot of Jaime acting like a lazy cat just batting shit off tables to annoy his new bodyguard while also being immediately into her in a way he hates. 
> 
> As always, come prompt me on tumblr if you'd like to see something! I'm looking forward to doing more of these now that HCM is over!

“No one lasts as Jaime’s bodyguard” is a truth that Jaime has heard said more than a dozen times now. Perhaps it should be humiliating, that he’s a man in his mid-thirties who’s such intolerable company that even his father, with his impossibly deep pockets, can’t pay someone enough to make it their job to want to keep Jaime alive.

_You’re too old for these pathetic rebellions_ , his father said after the third bodyguard quit in stunning fashion, stripping himself of his expensive Lannister Corporation suit right in the middle of Tywin’s office. But Jaime wasn’t sorry then, and he isn’t sorry now.

Usually it’s Barristan Selmy, head of security, giving the speech to the new hire, or occasionally Tyrion. Today it’s Cersei, put together in her sharp powersuit, with her newly cropped hair making her look as different from Jaime as possible, like even his twin doesn’t want to risk being mistaken for him. She’s carrying a stack of folders held against her chest, and she looks very stern and very disappointed and very _professional_ , which once would have been laughable.

_Sweet Jaime,_ she had said, when Jaime mentioned how odd it was to see her working for their father after her divorce. _I grew up._

Cersei stands near the door of her office now, hard and cold, and he slouches in one of the seats in front of her desk, spinning it slightly for good measure, as they wait for the new bodyguard to make an appearance. It’s a woman this time, he’s been told, which is of course a very _Cersei_ thing to do. Perhaps she thinks a woman will have more patience for him, or perhaps she simply wants to be able to point to another female employee the next time some reporter suggests that Lannister Corporation has a problem putting women in positions of power.

The woman who enters isn’t all that surprising to Jaime, though he can see from the scowl on her face that she’s ready for him to laugh. He supposes another man _might_ laugh. A man who didn’t love his little brother fiercely. A man who didn’t spend most of his young adulthood listening to the kinds of things that people said about Tyrion when they thought that Big Brother Jaime wasn’t around. Jaime isn’t that man, but he understands why she looks at him as if he is.

She’s tall. She has mismatched features. Some of them are nicer than others—beautiful eyes and full lips, but she has a weak chin and a strong jaw and a too-high forehead, and it all adds up to something jarring. Plain, perhaps ugly, if he’s being entirely fair. He sees why she went into the field of personal security; every bit of her is muscled. Her suit coat and pants are ill-fitting and don’t cling as much as they would if she wanted to show it off, but he can see the power that she must carry everywhere. Her thighs are particularly…obvious. He can feel his eyebrows raising automatically. His first scrambled thought is just… _heat_.

_Oh_ , he thinks, understanding. Cersei’s smiling at him just slightly. A pointed, shit-eating kind of smirk that makes her look like their father. His twin was given the task of hiring a bodyguard that Jaime wouldn’t immediately drive away, and so she found a woman that she knew Jaime would be intrigued by. More than intrigued by. _Drawn_ to. How did she know? Even Jaime hadn’t until he saw her. But she’s _interesting._ Every other bodyguard has been so boring, so forgettable, so un-special. This woman at least inspires _something_ in Jaime, though he’s not sure he knows quite what it is, yet.

“Ms. Tarth, this is my brother, Jaime,” Cersei says, gesturing to Jaime as she crosses the room to shake Ms. Tarth’s hand. She’s wearing those heels that basically hobble her, the ones she can’t be persuaded to give up, because they make her calves look amazing. And even still, she’s dwarfed by this woman. This gigantic girl, who looks like she’s in her early twenties and carries herself like a pro-wrestler. “As I mentioned in your interview, a number of threats have recently been made against him. Jaime is my father’s heir, and obviously there are people who want to see my father brought to his knees for the sake of competition.”

Jaime grins at Ms. Tarth, waiting for her to make an expression that reveals her true thoughts. It doesn’t come; she’s blank and sturdy as ever. Still. He knows it’s there. Disgust. Disinterest. Amusement, maybe, that Cersei’s so fluent in the kind of PR-speak that makes her so fucking good at this job. She’s smooth, polished, and maybe if you listen to her enough, you’d forget that Tywin Lannister runs one of the most ruthless, corrupt, and nauseating corporations in Westeros.

There could be a hundred reasons why Jaime’s being targeted by someone looking to take revenge on Tywin, and none of them can be summed up by _for the sake of competition._

“Have you ever heard of the Bloody Mummers?” he asks. Ms. Tarth locks eyes with him for the first time, and he feels nearly shaken by how blue they are. How guileless and innocent, too. He doesn’t like it. It makes his throat go dry to think of _her_ trying to protect _him_. Wakens some impulse inside, from before it was too late to be a better man. Some longing to be the kind of person who could be counted on to protect _anyone_.

“Yes,” she says. Her voice is deep, and as steady as the rest of her. Jaime laughs.

“That’s what you’re up against. If I were you, I’d leave me to my fate. Might as well do it now. They all do it eventually, and I’d rather avoid you becoming collateral damage.”

“I know what I signed up for,” Ms. Tarth says. She watches him with a steeliness that isn’t quite cold. An impassivity that isn’t quite judgmental.

* * *

Cersei takes Ms. Tarth to meet Selmy and begin her training. Jaime stays slumped in his chair in her office until she returns and closes her door, smiling the smug smile that looks the same on both their faces.

“You’re evil,” he says, and Cersei laughs. She sits behind her desk and he spins to face her. She perches glasses on the end of her nose, like a parody of a librarian, and he again feels arrested. Held back. Like she has aged without him. Grown up.

“I’m a genius,” she says, and then she turns away, no doubt to type out an email to their father. The only man in her life who has _always_ taken precedence over her twin. When she’s done, she takes off her glasses and folds her arms on the desk in front of her to wait for his judgement. He gives it to her promptly.

“You know they’re not mutually exclusive, right? Your little pet maester proves that.”

“Maybe not, but I hardly think it’s evil to try and force you to save yourself. You should be thanking me.”

“She’s too young.”

“Too young for what?”

“Throwing her life away if someone tries to take a shot at me.”

“She’s a professional. If she isn’t throwing her life away on you, she’ll be throwing it away on someone else. This is her chosen _career,_ Jaime. We wouldn’t hire just anybody. She comes highly recommended by Cat. _The patience of a septa_ is the description Cat used. Brienne spent the last two years guarding Sansa and Arya.”

“Gods,” Jaime mutters. “She _must_ have patience.”

“Cat’s under the impression that Brienne’s last experience means she’ll be able to handle _you_ with no problems. I’m…less optimistic, but if _anyone_ will be able to…”

“She’s too serious. She’ll hate me in a day, if you’re lucky.”

“You think you’re very difficult to read, Jaime, but you forget it’s _me_ you’re talking to. You drive them off on purpose, because you have some misguided belief that we should all just let you die for father’s company.”

“That is _not_ what it’s about.”

“No, of course not. It’s about protecting these paid professionals we keep having to replace. But there are only a few options here. Bodyguard, complete isolation under heavy guard, or you go out there and live your life while I sit around and wait for a call from the fucking Goldcloaks, or maybe a godsdamned ransom note.” Cersei’s angry now, and he knows it. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, avoiding her gaze. “Brienne will be well compensated for the risk she’s taking.”

“That’s _meaningless_ if she dies in the process.”

“She is a grown woman who makes her own choices, and this is what she has chosen to do with her life.” Cersei picks up one of her folders and whacks him on the head with it to get him to look at her. She glares at him. “I _refuse_ to bury you, Jaime.”

Jaime smiles a bit, because he cannot help it; when they were children, they always used to say that one could not exist in the world without the other. It was a simpler time. Cersei smiles back at him.

“She won’t last,” he says, apologetically. “They never do. I probably won’t be able to help myself.”

“Of course you will,” Cersei scoffs.

“For someone who claims to know me so well…”

“You were _biting your bottom lip_ when you looked at her legs, Jaime.”

“What? No I wasn’t.”

“Believe me, you were.”

“Absolutely not!”

“Powerful and stoic enough that you’ll be too intrigued to drive her away, and ugly enough that you won’t fuck her. Despite father’s insistence on only seeing worth in _you_ , his most useless child, Tyrion and I did our homework on this one.”

“Tyrion had a hand in it too?”

“Of course he did. The little lecher knows everyone’s secret desires. He’s disgusting, but I knew he was right the moment he said you’d like a strong, gentle woman.”

Jaime’s mouth drops open, and he cannot help but laugh.

“Oh, come on. That’s…I _need_ to know what he said about you.”

“That I like weak, easily dominated men.”

“Wow, he _is_ a genius.”

“Well it didn’t take a lot of brainpower, I’ll give you that, but he deserves the credit for Brienne. I think she’ll work out magnificently.”

“She’ll be gone in a week,” Jaime swears.

Cersei only smiles.


	6. Love at First Sight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 6 - Tyrion pesters Jaime to sign up for a dating app called Love at First Sight. Jaime decides to game the system by picking a woman he doesn't think will ever choose to match with him. Unfortunately, Brienne has the same thought.

“Love at First Sight?” Jaime asks.

“I know,” Tyrion says. “It sounds a bit hokey, but...”

“I can already tell you I’m too old for this app.”

“You aren’t! They have a surprisingly mature client base. Ellaria says they’re one of the few on the market who cater to the elderly specifically, so there’s…”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Tyrion laughs at him, picking up his speed to a trot when Jaime tries to outpace him. As always, Jaime’s little brother is cheerfully pleased with himself for being such an asshole.

“I was doubtful too, but Tysha was my _first_ date. Ellaria Sand is a fucking genius. She tried explaining the algorithm to me, but it all went over my head. And you know how little I like to admit to things like that.”

“You _are_ a singularly smug prick about your own intelligence.”

“And _you_ are getting defensive. Brother, look at me.” Jaime sighs, and does, because he knows that Tyrion is _trying_. For years, Jaime was too invested in his job at their father’s company, and in helping his twin through her rocky marriages and even rockier divorces. Dates were universally disappointing experiences for everyone involved, and he never quite got the hang of it. When he was younger, he’d thought it would be something that would happen to him naturally. Bumping into someone on the street. Meeting someone as they reached for the same book on a shelf in a bookstore. Something cheesy from a film. But as the years went by, Jaime’s heart remained unclaimed, and then his father’s shadier business practices came to light, and Jaime found that he no longer wanted the life he had built for himself. Cersei’s third marriage brought her all the way to Pyke, and she’d burned the final bridge between she and her twin on the way out, and so ever since then, his life has been…well. Fairly empty. He’s living off his trust fund, figuring out as he goes what _he_ wants from life instead of just doing everything his family wants of him. It’s the perfect time to date, but he doesn’t know how to get started.

Mentioning it to Tyrion was a mistake. Tyrion’s new girlfriend Tysha seems wonderful, but the two of them are disgusting to be around, and Jaime should have known that Tyrion would take Jaime’s casual complaints as a cry for help.

“I don’t think an app built around judging a person for their looks is going to be very helpful,” he says as diplomatically as he can. Tyrion laughs at him.

“No, you’ll definitely be fending them off with a stick. But it’s not about looks.”

“It’s called _Love at First Sight_ , Tyrion.”

“Yes, but there’s more to it. Physical attraction is just the last step. Ellaria’s algorithm gives you ten matches, based on a number of things. A survey, a background check…”

“A _background_ check?”

“Yes, and a deep dive of your online presence.”

“So anyone who’s matched with me is going to be matched with me based on fifteen-year-old articles about Aerys. Are you _trying_ to get me murdered?”

“Well, they’ll also be matched with you based on the much more recent _The Kingslayer was Right_ movement, so at least there’s that.”

“Tyrion…”

“The algorithm works, Jaime. I’m living proof.”

“You got lucky. I’m sure a lot of people have. What happens if I don’t make a match with any of the ten?”

“Well, you can pay extra to try again.”

“Of course I can.”

“She’s got to make money somehow! And it’s a fair enough system. You pick one of the ten matches based on their photos. If that match also picks you, you get a date. Everything is paid for by the service. You can chat a bit ahead of time, but Ellaria encourages only conversation about the technicalities—where to go, what kind of activity you want to take part in. The first date is supposed to be about getting to know each other.”

“This sounds like some kind of scam. If you didn’t know this woman personally, I’d advise you to check your credit card statements.”

“She’s Oberyn Martell’s girlfriend. I trust her completely.”

“That just means she has phenomenal taste. How is she possibly making money off of this?”

“Why are you so obsessed with the money? You’re still a Lannister, little as you like to admit it these days. It’s unbecoming. Just sign up for it and fill out the survey like a good dog. You won’t regret it.”

* * *

And, well. Jaime’s pretty sure that’s not true, but that night, he finds himself drinking a glass of arbor red in his empty apartment, scrolling through rescue cat listings, and he finally sighs and curses Tyrion and downloads the app onto his phone. He feels silly and outdated when he admits his age. He feels annoyed and absurdly out of place when he has to fill out seemingly hundreds of responses to nonsensical questions. It all feels very much like going to a fortune teller, or some kind of mummer’s show. How could it possibly be true that knowing what kind of pie is Jaime’s favorite will tell some algorithm enough to suggest a soulmate?

He finally reaches the end of the torturous exam, and he waits while a tastefully designed loading screen informs him that his matches are being generated. The list pops up, just pictures along with names, ages, and heights. No other information. No likes. No dislikes. Jaime sighs aloud. He scrolls through the pictures several times, making sure to look each one over carefully. There’s at least a variety of options to choose from, he supposes. Ages, genders, appearance. Each of the ten is entirely unique from each other, and he doesn’t think there’s much wrong with any of them.

Tyrion laughs at him when he calls to complain that he’s having a difficult time trying to pick.

“What do you mean, you’re having a difficult time? You’re the one who told me that this is useless. Just pick whichever one strikes your fancy the most.”

And, well. That’s a good point. Jaime _does_ think it’s useless, and he _does_ think this is a waste of time. Slightly fuzzy on the arbor red, he feels oddly defiant when he scrolls through his list again. Yes, it’s useless, and he doesn’t want to go on this date anyway. He picks number 8, Brienne. She’s posted a very demure picture, but it doesn’t do enough to hide features that he knows likely add up to ugliness.

If there’s one thing Jaime’s certain of, it’s the way he looks. It’s the way that people _tell him_ he looks. And there is no way that a women who hides so much of herself in pictures is ever going to work up the confidence to choose to match with _him_.

* * *

Brienne passes the phone off to Margaery.

“You fill it out for me,” she says. Sansa gasps and steals the phone back.

“No way!” she says. “You’ll ruin the algorithm. My friend Tyrion says it’s foolproof, but you _have_ to answer the questions yourself. Otherwise you’ll end up with the kind of people that Margaery would go on a date with, and I know you don’t want that.”

And, well, she has a point. Brienne sighs and continues answering the array of questions. Some of them feel too revealing, some of them feel purposeless, and some of them are just plain insulting. She can feel her cheeks burning when she gets to some of the racier ones, which just makes her feel pathetic. Sansa and Margaery are two of the worldliest girls she knows. If they hadn’t met at that self-defense class, Brienne isn’t sure she’d ever have become friends with girls like them. Not that she doesn’t love them, but they can be _a lot_ , and Brienne lives in a kind of terror that they’re going to realize just how lame she is compared to them.

Because she _is_. She’s lame. She’s perfectly content with being lame. She has never been anything but, and at this point in her life, she’s comfortable with who she is. She’s the girl who doesn’t date. She’s the girl who befriends louder personalities because her own is so quiet. She’s the girl who had a few terrible dating experiences, decided that the potential reward of dating wasn’t worth the heartache, and went and found other things to do with her life. She’s lame, and she _likes_ being lame. It hasn’t steered her wrong so far. But girls like Sansa and Margaery can’t understand that, and they think that her life must be some kind of empty hell that she’s just too brave to talk about, and Brienne doesn’t really know what to do except take the stupid quiz and let Sansa pay for her first ten matches on the site.

The good thing is that she’s _sure_ it isn’t going to go farther than that. She’ll get her ten matches, she’ll hit the man least likely to choose her in return, and inevitably he will not have picked her. Who would? Sansa will be too polite to suggest something like lowering her standards, and Brienne will be able to feel like she satisfied the terms of Sansa’s insistence that she had to _give it a shot_ without actually having to go on any dates with people.

She understands the appeal that girls like Sansa might find in this kind of service, though she knows that Sansa only used the app once; she and her cousin rigged it so that they would match each other and could go see the new Satin Flowers play together on the app’s dime. And perhaps Brienne is being unfair with her bitterness over the fact that girls like Sansa don’t _have_ to use dating apps to find men to go out with them. Sansa has one of the most fraught dating histories of anyone Brienne has ever met, and she shouldn’t forget that just because Sansa is pretty.

But that doesn’t mean she should have to indulge Sansa, either. This is a good compromise. Sansa will probably assume that Brienne will try again, hooked on the algorithm that’s supposed to take her one step closer to finding the perfect man. In reality, Brienne will delete the app as soon as she’s home, and then she’ll never mention it again and hope that Sansa doesn’t mention it either.

When Brienne is done with her quiz, and the matches pop up, there’s a lot of what she would expect. Men who look like the female version of her: tall, muscled, stoic. She tries not to grimace as she scrolls past the first few. It’s why she can never be all that upset that men don’t find her appealing; her own tastes don’t lie in that direction, either. She’s always favored prettier men.

Her final match, tacked on to the end of a disappointing list almost like an afterthought, is named Jaime. His photo is perfect in every way, and it manages that quality where it looks genuinely candid while still being akin to a glamor shot. It looks like whoever took the picture called his name, and he turned over his shoulder to grin. He’s wearing a hiking backback and a tight shirt that accentuates the muscles in his arms. His hair is golden, and fairly long, and he has a jawline that Brienne has only ever seen on movie stars. She nearly sighs aloud dreamily before she can stop herself.

She scrolls back up, and then again back down, pretending not to notice that the girls are watching her. Brienne can tell that they’re dying to look at her matches and counsel her on which one to pick. The redhead man, probably. They’ll want her to pick the person she has the best chance of matching with. The best chance of going on an actual date with. But Brienne doesn’t _want_ an actual date, and she certainly doesn’t want the redhead.

If she was following her gut instinct like the app encourages her to do, she’d pick Jaime anyway, wouldn’t she? Even if she has no hope of matching with him, even if she knows he would never pick her photo, she would choose him. He’s the only man of the bunch she’s attracted to, and that’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it?

She clicks on his picture before she can talk herself out of it. The app tells her that it will send her a notification about her results as soon as they’re available.

“Well?” Sansa asks. Brienne shrugs and tries to look nonchalant.

“We’ll see,” she says.

* * *

Jaime is annoyed.

He’s annoyed because he didn’t want to go on this fucking date and now he finds himself in the position of having to do it. He’s annoyed because he loves to pride himself on being _correct_ about things and now finds that he wasn’t correct about her at all. Brienne Tarth. His _date_ for the evening.

Not like he isn’t used to being wrong, but reading people is typically one of the few things for which he can be counted on, and he was annoyed to discover that he had missed the mark. He’s _been_ annoyed since he received the notification telling him that he matched with his chosen person, and he’s been annoyed since he exchanged a few very bland, very non-personal messages with Brienne Tarth to work out where they were going. He’s been annoyed all week waiting for the day to finally arrive, and now he’s annoyed because she’s ten minutes late, and he has to wonder if he’s been stood up.

Finally, he spots her, striding down the sidewalk towards him. She looks a bit different from her picture, which is to be expected, because everyone does. He doesn’t think it’s different in a _bad_ way, necessarily. She’s certainly no beauty, but she has arresting eyes and a powerful frame, and that would be more than enough to catch his eye even if he wasn’t waiting for her. He can see that someone’s gone through the trouble of styling her hair and putting on some makeup. She has already smudged it around one eye a bit, so he can tell that she isn’t used to it, and he doubts it was her choice. He feels a sting of unexpected remorse for his shit mood. Something about the way she walks towards him, her eyes downcast, her shoulders tense, reminds him of Tyrion. That expectation that the world is _going_ to give you hell, so you might as well brace for it. Tyrion meets it head on, and happily, but Jaime can already tell that Brienne Tarth is not that sort of person, and he’s sorry for it.

When she looks up to find him watching her approach, she hesitates, plainly taken aback to see him. Perhaps she expected him to leave.

“I’m sorry,” she says when she gets close. Her voice is rich and deep. He knew from her profile that she was tall, but it’s somehow startling to stand next to a woman taller than him. Her voice is very smooth, polite, exactly like he’d imagined from her messages. Bland, he’d thought, but at least her voice is nice enough to offset the blandness. “My friends…”

She trails off, awkward, her freckled face going slightly blotchy with the embarrassment, as if she has babbled on for ages instead of stumbling to a halt after a sentence and a half. Remorse again, and Jaime swallows his shittier impulses to demand an explanation for the lateness, or call the date off, or whatever else he wants to do to get out of this mess.

“It’s no trouble,” he says. “I was beginning to think you changed your mind.” Her smile then is more of a grimace, and Jaime’s remorse flies out the window. “Ah,” he says. “So you _did_ change your mind.”

“I…” she starts, blinking at him, guileless blue eyes doing this annoying thing where they pierce straight through to his heart. “No,” she says. “I didn’t want to come in the first place.” She hesitates again, barely giving him time to absorb that before she blurts, “why in the name of the gods did you pick _me_?”

“ _What_? Why did you pick _me_ if you didn’t think I was going to pick you?”

“Because I didn’t think you would!” She sounds angry with him now, and relief comes over him, and he laughs openly. She darts a glance around, very aware that they’re standing in the middle of the sidewalk outside this museum, and he’s being loud in public, but Jaime is so relieved and amused and a hundred things at once, and he has always had trouble tempering his emotions.

“I picked you because I didn’t think _you_ would pick _me_ ,” he says, and Brienne stares at him, her big blue eyes looking even bigger and bluer in her incredulity.

“ _What_?” she asks.

“I didn’t want to go on this date either. I didn’t want to go on _any_ dates. My brother met his girlfriend through this stupid app and wouldn’t let me alone until I tried it, so I figured I’d pick someone who wouldn’t ever pick me.”

“You thought _I_ wouldn’t pick _you_?” she asks. She’s still angry. Jaime sighs, knowing how it sounds.

“Well, yes,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d be quite your type.”

She gives him a doubtful look, but decides to let that stand as it is, for which Jaime is grateful. His reasoning would sound cruel if he said it aloud.

“What do we do, then?” she asks.

“Well, our tickets are already paid for. I actually _did_ really want to see this exhibition, if you’re still interested.”

“Yes,” she says, and she _does_ sound relieved. “All right. That would be…nice.”

* * *

_Nice_ is exactly what it is. Nice as a word has gotten a bit of a reputation for basically meaning pleasant but uninteresting, but _nice_ is the only thing that Jaime can think, and it doesn’t feel uninteresting at all. It’s _nice_ that he and Brienne turn out to both be interested in the same exhibition. It’s _nice_ that the app has gone all out, paying for a private showing so that he and his “date” can wander around at their leisure. It’s _nice_ that he and Brienne both know a lot, but that there are things he doesn’t know that she _does_ , and that there are things she doesn’t know that he has done a lot of research on. It’s _nice_ that Brienne loses some of her awkward shyness as she explains to him the different heraldry on the armor and what variations signify. It’s nice that she laughs at his jokes. It’s nice that their allotted two hours fly by so quickly that he’s genuinely startled when the representative from the museum comes to collect them.

Afterward, at dinner, it’s nice that their conversation flows easily. It’s nice that they still have a lot to talk about. It’s nice that Brienne is the first person he’s been out with in a long time who makes him feel like he’s interesting, or like what he has to say has merit. _All of it_ is nice, and it feels like there has to be some trap, or some trick, because surely it can’t be this easy.

* * *

Afterward, they wait outside for the friend who is coming to pick her up. She grows quiet, shy like she was in the beginning. She’s got her arms wrapped around herself like she’s cold, and Jaime wishes he had a coat to offer her. That would probably be pretty gallant.

“This was nice,” she says, as her friend pulls up. Jaime agrees. He wants to kiss her on the cheek, but she’s already moving away, with a last wave back. He watches her go. He shoves his hands into his pockets and waits for his own car courtesy of Tyrion. Now that the glimmer of the date has worn off, he finds himself _annoyed_ that it went so well. It wasn’t supposed to go well. It was supposed to be a disaster so that Tyrion would leave him alone about dating. Now he finds himself thinking that it wasn’t so bad, spending the evening with someone who likes the same things he likes. Maybe the problem is that he’s always been trying to date the people that his family tried to set him up with. Maybe the problem is that his family doesn’t know him as well as he would like.

When he’s back inside his apartment, his phone dings. A notification from the Love at First Sight app, asking him to rate the date.

_Sometimes we don’t get it in one, and that’s okay!_ The instructions read. _Tell us about your experience so that we can make the next effort a more successful one! Every bit of data you give us will help hone our algorithm._

_Or,_ it continues. _If your date was a success, congratulations! Let us know if you want to keep seeing your match. If your match agrees, we’ll unlock their full profile for you to look at, and you’ll be able to message each other!_

There’s a lot more legal stuff at the bottom, but Jaime scrolls through it quickly enough. He rates his date five stars, because it was easily the best date he’d been on in years, maybe ever.

When the app asks if he’d like to see Brienne again, he hesitates. He knows they went into it understanding that it _wasn’t_ a date, and maybe that was why it was so successful. Maybe if they tried again, went on a _real_ date, they’d both be nervous and awkward and it would be terrible.

Maybe.

And maybe she won’t hit _yes_ , anyway. Maybe she didn’t have nearly as nice a time as Jaime did. Maybe she enjoyed it but doesn’t want to hit _yes_ , knowing that it would be putting out a signal that she was interested in more. Maybe it’s destined to be just a nice evening with a stranger, never to be repeated.

Maybe.

“Fuck it,” he says to his empty apartment. What does he have to lose? He hits _yes_ , and he waits for the app to gather Brienne’s response as well.

* * *

Across town, sitting on her own couch, running her hand nervously through her hair as she drags herself through her own version of Jaime’s internal debate, Brienne decides to hit _yes_ , too.


	7. High School Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brienne meets up with Jaime again at their 10 year high school reunion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was prompted a couple of different times on tumblr about a high school reunion, and finally decided to actually write one! This was supposed to be "a short fic" based on the tumblr prompts, and it is not really that short at all, but I tried!

One day, Brienne is _going_ to stop doing things just because they’re the things people are _supposed_ to do.

She’s going to stop dating men she doesn’t like just because they show an interest in her and she doesn’t want to be alone. She’s going to stop constantly policing her size and her weight just because everyone else in the world seems to be about a foot shorter and three sizes smaller. She’s going to stop keeping up with old friends on social media who she would rather have forgotten when they left high school.

She’s going to stop agreeing to go to things like _high school reunions_ just because it seems like something she _should_ do.

It’s like she had forgotten, in the ten years since she graduated. She had forgotten how much she hated the sneering not-quite-meanness of most of the girls she went to school with. She had forgotten how little she liked feeling like she was constantly the butt of every joke. It must have been a fit of madness when she hit ‘accept’ on the e-vite.

“ _I’m_ not even going,” Cat said, incredulous, when Brienne confessed what she had done. “Why would you ever want to go back there?”

High school had not been for Catelyn Tully what it was for Brienne Tarth, but Cat was there with Brienne for every moment, and she knows what it was, even if she didn’t quite experience it. It makes Brienne feel like an even bigger idiot to see Catelyn so confused by her choice.

“I don’t know. It just seemed like something I had to do,” she had replied.

* * *

Now she’s standing, alone, in the gymnasium of their old high school. She would have expected something a little swankier from Kings Landing High, but maybe it’s on purpose; everything looks catered and expensive, but the gym around them is shabby and the same as ever. They were probably going for some sort of aesthetic. Brienne can’t say she really gets it. She’s too busy feeling sweaty and too large and perfectly out of place.

She opted for heels tonight because sometimes they make her feel powerful, but she feels already that it was a mistake. She stands head and shoulders above everyone else except for Gregor Clegane, who’s still probably taller than her. She feels gawky rather than powerful. Her skirt feels too short rather than perfect for a twenty-eight-year-old professional. Her top feels ill-fitted rather than loose and flowy. The short sleeves seem to stretch over her muscled arms obscenely instead of flattering them the way they’d felt in the shop. Everything feels wrong somehow when she’d felt actually _pretty_ when she was getting ready, and if she was still seventeen or eighteen, she’d probably hide in a bathroom stall and then perhaps leave at the nearest opportunity. But she _isn’t_ seventeen or eighteen, and for some reason she has determined that this is something she has to do, and so she strides up to the front desk and _pretends_ at confidence. That’s something she’s gotten better at, at least. Pretending.

There’s probably a petty little nugget inside everyone when they go to these things, these reunions, where they wonder if ten years is long enough for some of the worst of the cruel people to start looking horrendously ugly. Brienne supposes she’s lucky that that idea is dispelled the moment she walks up to the table and finds both Cersei Lannister and Taena Merryweather looking gorgeous. More beautiful, actually. Cersei’s wearing a red and gold gown that looks more expensive than anything Brienne has ever worn, and she wears it with a casual ease that manages to convey that trite “oh, _this_ old thing?” without seeming performed. She’s lounging more than sitting, her legs crossed so the fabric drapes over them beautifully, the stem of a wine glass held in perfectly manicured fingernails. She watches Brienne approach without a hint of a smile, and she takes a delicate sip.

Taena was always better at performing niceness, which is probably why she’s the one actually checking people in while Cersei sits in silent judgement at her side. But Brienne remembers her cruel mocking voice along with the rest when The Bet happened, and she doesn’t make the mistake of forgetting it. Her own expression does not waver. She smiles politely, as if she’s checking into a hotel room. She thanks Taena as if she’s never met her in her life. She doesn’t look at Cersei once.

She walks away from the table, nametag firmly in place even though it seems like a sick joke to mark her when everyone here will know who she is. She wishes she had to worry about everyone forgetting her. She wishes she _could_ be forgettable. She heads to the catering table on the other side of the room, and she gets a glass of wine and something to nibble on while she scans the room frantically for people she knew.

The awkward beginning gives way to a slightly less awkward middle. Elia Martell finds her, dragging along Lyanna Stark as her plus one for the evening. On another woman that might be a supremely petty act, but on Elia and Lyanna it’s a defiant one that Brienne adores; Rhaegar Targaryen stays far away from both of his former wives, sulking with his group of worshipping acolytes as far from the two women he wronged as possible. The whole thing didn’t explode until five years after high school was over, but Brienne would wager everyone here heard about it.

After Elia stakes her claim on Brienne, a few more former acquaintances slink out of the background, mostly to ask after Cat and the kids, since they know Brienne is still close with them. Brienne shows off pictures of the children as proudly as if they are her own, and everyone coos and awws over little Sansa with her brilliant red hair and Robb’s chubby toddler cheeks. Lyanna has her own set of pictures, including some of Brienne holding Sansa, and she shows them around happily. Brienne starts to feel…not loosened up, exactly, but less prepared for something horrible, and then she sees the lacquered gold nails of Cersei Lannister wrapped around Lyanna’s phone.

Lyanna tries to snatch it back immediately; she was always one of the only people in the school who remained unimpressed with the girl everyone else was so terrified of.

“My, my, Brienne. Motherhood looks stunning on you,” Cersei says, swiping through a few more pictures, fending Lyanna off and managing to make even _that_ look graceful. Finally, Lyanna gets her hands on the phone, darting an apologetic look over her shoulder at Brienne, who only shakes her head; there is no stopping Cersei Lannister when she decides to target you. Brienne knows that well enough.

“It’s Cat’s daughter, Sansa,” Brienne answers steadily. She knows Cersei knows that. Cat and Cersei are, well. Not friends, but _friendly_ , occasionally. Sansa has a little lion toy that she sleeps with every night in her crib that Cersei bought her.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought maybe with that red hair, you and Ron got together after all.”

“Fuck _off_ , Cersei,” Lyanna groans. “Gods, you’re still such a cunt for no reason, aren’t you?” She nudges Cersei out of the circle with her elbow, filling in the gap she left, and Cersei laughs before heading back the way she came, the parting blow delivered.

“Don’t listen to her,” Elia says. Brienne feels oddly…fine. She has avoided Cersei Lannister at every turn, terrified to see her again, knowing that they have enough mutual acquaintances that it might happen one day, and now that it _has_ …she’s fine. Ron Connington, _really_? Was that the best Cersei could do? Bringing up the _bet_? There are so many more things she could have said to make Brienne feel…

“I’m okay,” she says. “It’s fine.” She feels _happy_ for the first time since coming to this thing. She could laugh. “I’m going to head to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

* * *

She dabs cold water on her face and looks at herself in the mirror. In high school, a confrontation with Cersei would have left her red and blotchy for almost an hour after, but there’s nothing on her skin but her freckles and a slight flush from the wine. She grins at herself in the mirror. Her lips are still too thick. Her teeth still too big. But it doesn’t bother her anymore. _Cersei Lannister_ doesn’t bother her anymore.

She exits the bathroom, still smiling to herself, almost physically unable to stop. Back out into the dimly lit back hallway of the school. The light from the bathroom slices across the battered old tile on the floor as she pushes the door open, and it highlights Jaime, leaning against the wall across from it.

She stops, and the door swings closed, and he’s still standing there, watching her. His arms are folded across his chest. He’s leaning as casually against the wall as Cersei was leaning in her chair, earlier. Always mirroring each other, even when they try not to.

“Jaime,” she blurts.

_“Cersei says he’s not going,”_ Cat had said, casually, about a week ago, and Brienne had been relieved to hear it. But that was a lie, clearly. And such a Cersei one, too. She must have known that Brienne would be worried about seeing him.

“Brienne,” he says.

If Cersei looks beautiful tonight, Jaime looks _impossible_. He was always gorgeous, but in a boyish, pretty way. Brienne had always liked boys like him, and it was no surprise that she liked Jaime, too. The only surprise, really, was that he liked her back.

Now, he looks…she’s seen a few pictures, over the years. Mostly by accident; she avoids them as much as she can. But he’s beautiful now in a way that pictures don’t quite capture. Graceful instead of awkward in adolescence. He’s grown into all his features in a way Brienne used to hope _she_ would. He’s turned lean youthfulness into a well-muscled frame. He has grown out his hair a bit, and it falls to his shoulders and looks soft to the touch. His suit fits him perfectly. Brienne thinks of horror movies where the lead girl is led into the darkness by beautiful creatures that tempt them with perfection, but only briefly. She isn’t the lead girl. Maybe she was, for a little bit, for a few months that summer, but that wasn’t _her_ life. That was the life of some other, bolder girl.

“How are you?” she manages to ask. Jaime nods, noncommittal.

“Fine. How are you?” He makes the question seem more pointed, and Brienne doesn’t understand. “Cersei,” he elaborates. “I saw her…”

“Oh. No. Fine, actually. I thought I’d be more upset, but…” She shrugs, and she watches the way the muscles in Jaime’s jaw work as if he’s trying to hold himself back from saying something.

“That’s good,” he finally says. “I know she used to…get to you.”

She feels the sting of that, unexpectedly. She looks down at her feet.

“Yes,” she admits.

The silence stretches, grows, gets awkward. Brienne wonders if the blotchy color is in her cheeks _now_. Jaime’s kindness was always more difficult to deal with than Cersei’s cruelty.

He’d been cruel like the rest of them, once. Unthinking and uncaring. Jaime and Cersei were at the absolute top of the high school food chain, and it was easy for them to swipe at anyone who passed, like lazy lions barely even _trying_ to wound the smaller animals that scurried underfoot.

The accident had changed everything for him. Hit by a car while crossing the street in front of the school, Jaime had been terrified and confused when Brienne ran to help him. She was the first one there, her long legs for once an advantage. She held him down when he tried to move. She wrapped her t-shirt around his bleeding arm, trying to protect it. She hadn’t had a single fucking clue as to what she was doing, but afterward the EMTs had reassured her over and over while she shook that she had done the right thing. Her father, when he heard, insisted that they had to visit Jaime in the hospital, and so they had gone, bringing a bouquet of flowers, even though Brienne wasn’t sure if that was what you were supposed to do for boys. Jaime’s hospital room was empty, and there were no gifts on the bedside table, and he was so weirdly happy to see her. She thought it was the drugs at first, but he talked clearly enough, and he told her and her father all about his surgeries and the pain and how horrible it was, charming Selwyn and slightly less successfully charming Brienne, too.

After that, it was different.

If she was watching a movie, some teen romcom, obviously it would make sense that he would kiss her after the graduation party. They had become friends since the accident, so maybe it was building all that time. Waiting for the right moment. Obviously it would make sense that she would lose her virginity to him in the pool house behind his parents’ home. Obviously it would make sense that he would tell her that he’d been wanting to kiss her for a while.

But at the time…she isn’t sure what she thought, exactly, but it wasn’t like the movies at all. It was strange and foreign and confusing. She had kissed him, let him fuck her, let him hold her afterward, and all the while she was terrified and sure that she was making a mistake. Not a mistake because of the sex—if she had to choose anyone in the world for her first time, it would have been him. But how could she trust him? After what Ron and those other boys had done, Brienne wasn’t sure she trusted anyone anymore.

Jaime kept calling her. Kept kissing her. Kept texting her at all hours of the night. Brienne clung to him fiercely when they were together. She was so sure when he was looking at her. He was impossible to disbelieve. But every time she went home, the doubts would come back.

In some ways, college was a relief.

It was too late for either of them to do something foolish like transfer schools to be together. Jaime seemed to think they would just do the long distance thing for the first year and then find a way to get closer, but Brienne knew the truth. Those last few days of summer were difficult, and she remembers that they both cried when it was time for Brienne to get into her car and drive away. She still remembers watching him in the rearview mirror. It was just like something out of one of those sad, coming-of-age movies.

She knew what was going to happen, so she wasn’t surprised when their phone calls came less frequently, and she wasn’t surprised when they weren’t texting each other as much. When she went home for the weekends, she wasn’t surprised that Cersei always found a way to mention all the friends Jaime was making at school, trying to make Brienne jealous, or upset, or something. Cersei didn’t understand that it wouldn’t work; Brienne already knew exactly what was going to happen.

She wasn’t surprised when, by the time winter break rolled around, she and Jaime were barely speaking at all. She asked to meet him at his house, and they talked about it. Jaime still thought there was some way to make it work, but he admitted that it was a strain on both of them, and so they ended it. Brienne hadn’t even really been _sad_ about it, at the end. It just felt like a relief when she got back into her car and walked away. She’d been waiting for it all semester, and it was easier to move forward into the next one without worrying about it. Being with Jaime was always just a little bit difficult, because there were so many prettier, funnier, cleverer girls he could have chosen to be with, and so there was always an anticipation. Waiting for it to happen. Waiting for him to _realize._

Hindsight makes things different, of course. She thinks now that Jaime was probably right; they probably could have tried harder. Made it work, if they were serious. A few months doesn’t seem like the struggle it did when she was actually going through it. And she _liked_ being with Jaime. She liked the way it felt like a victory against the other kids in school, but mostly she liked it because she liked _him_. He always made her laugh, and he made her forget herself sometimes. She could believe that he liked to be with her. She could believe that he wanted to kiss her, that he didn’t mind her height, that he thought she was funny, too.

“I should,” she starts to say, taking one careful step back towards the gym.

“Brienne, I,” he says at the same time. She stops. He stops, too. They both wait. It’s Jaime who breaks the silence eventually, because of course it is. “Brienne, it’s good to see you.”

“It’s…yes,” she says.

“I came here tonight, because…” he hesitates. She feels that tension again, for just a moment. The tension she felt when he kissed her, and when they moved toward the bed, and when he pulled off her t-shirt with shaking hands and then cupped her face and _looked_ at her before kissing her again. Like he knew she needed proof that he wanted to. “Because…” She almost cannot breathe for waiting for it. He looks up at her like he used to, and it’s not so difficult anymore to see the boy he was beneath the man he became. Still unsure about the strangest things. Still Jaime. “Because I wanted to see you. I know it’s been years, but you…I always wondered. If we would ever…”

It’s as if he has shoved her hard in the center of her chest. A persistent pressure against her breastbone followed by an ache that starts low in her gut. After they’d broken up, he stood in the driveway and watched her drive away, just like he did when she first left for college. She remembers looking at him in the rearview then, too, and seeing the way he looked after her. She feels that again. This pull back toward him, as if part of her was crying out that she had made a mistake.

“I wondered, too,” she says. There is a beat before he smiles. It’s a small smile, at first, and it grows bigger.

“Of course you did,” he says. “How could you not?”

“All right,” she grumbles, threatening to turn and go, but Jaime only laughs, and follows her, and takes her arm to spin her around. She towers over him in her heels, but he has never minded. He’s looking at her very intently, and she knows what he wants. She knows he won’t ask for it. She knows he’s waiting for her to make the call. She was the one who said they should end it, so she’s going to have to be the one who starts it again.

She doesn’t make him wait long. She leans down, and she kisses him. Just once. It’s almost _polite_. Like a handshake version of a kiss. It feels right. Sealing some kind of deal. When she pulls back, Jaime’s grinning at her. His hand is still on her arm, but now he tucks it through, like he’s escorting her.

“Let’s get something to drink,” he says. “And then let’s get the fuck out of here. Dinner or something. I don’t want to have our first date in almost ten years _here_.”

“We never went on any dates,” Brienne points out, and Jaime looks up at her, grin glittering.

“Good point. Even more reason to do it.” He waits, again. Not hesitating, really, not _nervous_ in the way she still kind of is. Just waiting for her to decide.

“All right,” she says. She thinks of him standing in his driveway again, in her rearview mirror. And then she stops thinking about it. She follows him out to his car, and they get into it together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's where I admit that I didn't write a HS reunion one for a while because I chose not to go to my own high school reunion, because I am nothing like Brienne in this fic and would never do something I didn't want to do just because it's what you're "supposed" to do lmao


	8. You've Got Mail, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 8 - You've Got Mail AU, Part 2. Brienne runs into Jaime outside school, and it makes her reconsider how she has been treating him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still working on the tumblr prompts you've all sent me! But I'm feeling a bit under the weather today, and some of those prompts are taking on a life of their own, so I'm posting one I've had ready for a little while. Enjoy!

**WidowsWail:** You’re insane.

Brienne grins at the notification and practically lunges for her phone. As always, she’s a bit self-conscious of what she looks like while she’s doing it: overeager. Pathetic. Undisciplined. Even alone in her own apartment, she can’t relax fully. Everything is always just a little bit of a performance, because she spends every moment in public regulating herself to avoid embarrassment. It’s frustrating.

WidowsWail is the only thing that makes it…well. Not all right, but _better_.

**Oathkeeper:** What did I do this time?

**WidowsWail:** im finally reading that _awful_ series of essays you recced

**Oathkeeper:** Guess I don’t need to ask how you like them.

**WidowsWail:** theyre ridiculous. Ive told you before I don’t buy any theory that has them non-romantic.

**Oathkeeper:** they make some compelling points! It’s important to look at the other side of things.

**WidowsWail:** who ARE u? not important if the other side is wrong. Not everything is a two sides are both right thing, and u know it. Oathkeeper and the Kingslayer were in love. End of story.

It’s just more of his typical banter, but it sticks with Brienne, after they’re done arguing for a bit. _Who are you?_ Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? And the more time goes by, the more Brienne dreads having to give him the answer.

Who are you? Just Brienne Tarth, hideous local gym teacher. She has to imagine WidowsWail probably isn’t very attractive either, given that he hasn’t asked to meet or exchange anything more personal yet, but there’s a difference between _not very attractive_ and _huge and lumbering with a facial scar and features that don’t make sense_ , and Brienne has always been acutely aware of that. Hard not to be when the men she _does_ date are invariably cruel to her about that fact, and think themselves some kind of prize for her no matter how ugly or boring or terrible _they_ are.

WidowsWail is kind, and funny, and perhaps her best friend in the world, and Brienne knows that she’s not imagining the romantic undercurrent to all their conversations, especially obvious ever since she broke up with Hyle. Maybe WidowsWail just as worried about meeting her as Brienne is. Maybe _he’s_ got some unsightly aspect that he’s frightened of, too. Maybe one day when they finally both work up the courage, they’ll meet and find each other not lacking but _perfect_ , just the way it works in films.

Or maybe he’ll take one look at her and run in the other direction.

It’s safer to keep things like this: solely on the app. Never meeting in person. The ‘what ifs’ in either direction are too frightening, and Brienne isn’t the sort of person who takes risks easily. Or at all, if she can help it.

* * *

She’s debating between a few different books to send her niece, staring down at the covers in the middle of the book store, when a small blonde child pops up next to her. A girl, comically short beside Brienne. She has her hands on her hips and is nodding appraisingly, like a miniature version of a store employee.

“ _Definitely_ the one with the wolf on the cover,” she says, worldly and wise and companionable enough that Brienne has to blink at her a few times in shock before she works up the ability to respond.

“Oh?” she asks. “Have you read it?” Despite being an educator, Brienne has never had the easiest time talking to children, especially ones as young as this. The students she teaches are all old enough to be cruel with their words sometimes, but most of them like her and her reassuring steadiness. They find her comforting. Small children can be worse, because they’ll say hurtful things without realizing just how hurtful they are. But this little girl is looking up at Brienne’s scar, and she doesn’t ask any mortifying questions, and she doesn’t make a face, or avert her eyes, or say something mean. And then she tucks her hair behind her ear, like she’s sharing a secret, and Brienne can see that this little girl has a scar, too. It snarls up the side of her face, to her ear. Brienne’s throat clogs with unexpected emotion, and she smiles at her new little friend, exposing the too-big teeth she often tries to hide. The girl smiles back.

“Yes,” she says. “It’s a whole series. My uncle bought them for me when I had to miss school for a little while. He taught me how to read them and everything. They’re very good.”

“My niece is a bit younger than you. Do you think she’d have any trouble?”

“No, not at all! Not if she’s good at reading!”

“I think she is.”

“And if not, you could help her.”

“Myrcella!”

Brienne and the blonde girl turn at once, and only Brienne’s rigid self-discipline keeps her from groaning aloud.

_Of course_ , she thinks. _Of course he’s here_.

Jaime Lannister moves towards she and the blonde girl, smiling his most threatening, amused smile. The one she hates the most. He looks like he’s going to pretend that this is a fun coincidence for both of them, which always makes it worse. When he’s disagreeing with her, arguing with her, or making fun of her, she can handle that. She has always been able to handle men like him. It’s when he insists on pretending to respect her, pretending to value her opinion, pretending to think she’s anything other than what she is, that’s when she has trouble with him.

“Sorry, Uncle Jaime,” the blonde girl says. “But she has my favorite book.”

“Not a good enough reason to talk to a stranger, but you got lucky. Hello, Brienne.”

“Mr. Lannister,” Brienne replies, trying to remain as cool and professional as she can in the face of this unexpected unpleasantness. Jaime frowns at her for that. Why must she always be so awkward in front of him? No matter what she says and how she acts, she feels off-balanced by him.

“Myrcella, this is the new gym teacher at work,” Jaime says. His vague disappointment smooths over into politeness once more. “Brienne, this is my niece, Myrcella.”

“She’s buying books for _her_ niece,” Myrcella says happily. “And we loved this one, right Tommen?”

Brienne notices for the first time that there’s a small boy peeking out from behind Jaime’s leg, clinging to the material of Jaime’s jeans. One big green eye is visible, starring up at Brienne with wonder. Brienne smiles reflexively, and he hides his face. Jaime laughs, and she can feel her skin blotching as a result, but Jaime isn’t laughing at her. He spins around and hoists Tommen up so that he can hold the young boy.

“Where are your manners, Tommen?” he asks teasingly. Tommen hides his face in Jaime’s shoulder, and Jaime laughs again, bouncing him on his hip. “I’m sorry about him. He’s shy.”

“He’s a big baby,” Myrcella asserts, which makes Tommen peek away from Jaime’s neck just to stick his tongue out at his sister. It makes Brienne ache for childhood, a bit, when she and Gal used to tease each other just like that. Always with love behind it, which came through so clear in Myrcella’s mocking. There was something so freeing in that, in knowing that no matter what, Gal wouldn’t ever tease her beyond what she could handle, and that he would always protect her from the harsher words of others. They still see each other all the time, but sometimes Brienne misses when it was just them against everyone else. A bond that she could always turn to. Rely on.

“I’m shy too, Tommen,” she finds herself offering. “It’s all right. I understand.”

“You’re too big to be shy,” Myrcella scoffs, but she wilts quickly when Jaime looks sharply in her direction. “Not in a _bad_ way!”

“It’s all right,” Brienne says.

“We’re trying to teach Myrcella to think before she speaks,” Jaime says. Myrcella glares at him.

“I _think_ ,” she insists.

“You certainly don’t,” Jaime replies. Myrcella sticks her tongue out at him, next. Brienne feels like she’s catching a glimpse at something she was never meant to see. Something shifting inside her, a realization forming in a way she doesn’t like.

The way he talks to them, with that mingled fondness and his usual sarcasm. The way he rolls his eyes and ruffles Myrcella’s hair and teases her about her taste in books, and she returns the same level of snark, unbothered. The way Tommen clings to him, even when Jaime is gently mocking him for hiding his face away. Like Tommen feels safe with him. Like Tommen _loves_ him.

It’s just…Jaime. That’s just how he is, how he talks, and all this time Brienne has assumed that he for some reason had it out for her. That he disliked her. That he was being cruel to her.

She tries to remember her first impression of Jaime. Her first meeting with him. She finds she can’t remember exactly what was said. She only remembers the heat of humiliation when he said something to her. Something that she thought was cruel, but…she remembers saying something back. Making it clear that she wouldn’t tolerate any of his mockery, and making it clear that she knew it was there despite his outward charisma.

_I’ve always made bad first impressions_ , she remembers telling WidowsWail once. _And I’m too defensive_.

Jaime doesn’t like her any more than she likes him, she’s sure. But is it because of who she is? Or is it because of how she reacted to him?

* * *

Seeing Jaime outside of work, seeing him with his niece and nephew, who clearly love him, stays with Brienne when she gets back home. There’s something mortifying about it. Maybe mortifying because she misunderstood his personality so badly, or maybe mortifying just because she saw a man she did not think existed in him, and now she feels like she has to reexamine everything she thought she knew about him. She isn’t used to being wrong about people. She’s used to people treating her a certain way, and she’s used to that treatment meaning hatred or displeasure, and she’s used to _reacting_ to that hatred and displeasure. Catelyn tried to tell her that Jaime Lannister was a good man, and a good teacher, but Brienne saw what she wanted to see, and now she feels guilty. Unmoored, a bit.

* * *

**Oathkeeper:** have you ever misjudged someone?

She feels silly, sending WidowsWail the message, but he’s the only person she can think of to talk to about it. He’s her friend, and even though they usually talk more about their shared interests than their separate lives, she knows that they can’t keep things on the surface forever if they’re ever going to move past this. It’s not something she’s sure she wants yet, but she feels a desire to keep this propelling forward, anyway. Just in case.

WidowsWail takes an hour to respond, which makes her wish at least a dozen times that there was a way to take a message back. Delete it so that he won’t read it and think her hopelessly stupid.

But then, finally…

**WidowsWail:** No. as u know, im perfect

**Oathkeeper:** You type like a child but are “at least” ten years older than me.

**WidowsWail:** think it just proves im young @ heart

**WidowsWail:** but obviously yes I have misjudged people

**WidowsWail:** we all do it

**WidowsWail:** whats this about?

**Oathkeeper:** I realized today that I’ve been misjudging a co-worker.

She thinks about how to write it. Educators can be a pretty gossipy bunch, and even among the different schools in the area, there’s every chance that WidowsWail might know or at least have heard of Jaime Lannister. He’s fairly notorious for being both disgustingly handsome and good at his job, which are two things that Brienne can’t stand bout him. She and WidowsWail decided early on in this that they wouldn’t tell each other _anything_ about where they work, and she wants to stick to that.

**Oathkeeper:** I think I get so defensive about other people that I assume the worst before they really give me reason to, and then that cements my impression of them in a way that’s hard for me to shake. I think I did this with my co-worker, and I realized today that I think my impression of them has been wrong, and it made their impression of ME into a negative one. I don’t really know what to do about it.

**WidowsWail:** idk that you HAVE to do anything about it. Do they know?

**Oathkeeper:** That I misjudged them? Or how I feel about them?

**WidowsWail:** both?

**Oathkeeper:** I’m not sure. I’ve never been unprofessional about it. It’s possible they don’t know I’ve been treating them so defensively. I’m afraid now it will be awkward seeing them in person again.

**WidowsWail:** Itll be what u make of it. Just act like u always have if ur uncomfortable. I don’t think u should feel like u need to apologize.

**WidowsWail:** even if this person didnt do anything WRONG its not like u need to be their best friend. You can just act like u always have.

He’s right, of course. Just because Jaime Lannister might not be cruel to her on purpose, that doesn’t mean she wants to be his best friend. She was polite and professional to him when she halfway hated him, and she can be polite and professional again even if now she feels a little less harshly towards him.

It doesn’t have to change anything at all.


	9. Romancing The Stone, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Romancing the Stone AU, Part 1. Romance novelist Jaime Lannister has always craved love, but something has always been missing. On a mission to help his sister, he's forced to rely on good-hearted mercenary Brienne Tarth, who embodies the strong, noble men he has always written about. The men he always wished he could be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was prompted for a "tourist/knowledgeable local AU" on tumblr, and I guess I was just looking for an excuse to finally write the Romancing the Stone AU I've been lowkey thinking about for almost a year. I've made a bunch of changes from the movie (I mean, aside from the obvious gender-swap), mostly because slotting Brienne straight into Jack's role would require her to be kind of a selfish dick, and partly because it always bothered me how forgiving Joan was of the fact that Jack's goal the whole movie is to buy a fuckin boat. So I'm going to hit most of the beats of the movie, but there are definitely going to be a huge changes.

Jaime Lannister has always loved love.

His father has always been a cold-hearted bastard. His twin sister is only marginally warmer. Even his little brother Tyrion has a tendency to hide his heart beneath some fifteen layers of sarcasm. Jaime remembers his mother as someone soft and warm. Encouraging and beautiful. If she’d survived past Tyrion’s fifth birthday, maybe things would have been different.

Joanna Lannister wouldn’t have laughed at her son when he decided that he wanted to be a writer. He doesn’t remember much about his life before she died, but he remembers the way she would always ask him for more when he invented wild stories for her amusement. She would always look so amazed. She would say things like “you have such a talent!” and “you’re my little storyteller!” And maybe those words add up, eventually, when you hear them for years and years, and when they aren’t replaced with indifference and hostility and a lack of care.

When Jaime is first published, it’s almost an accident. He’s thirty-two years old when it happens, and he has been writing for years, but he’s never shown his words to anyone before, and he never expected anyone to want to read them. But Tyrion introduces him to Bronn, who is the world’s least likely agent for romance novelists, and Jaime reads roughly four thousand of the things to understand the genre well enough to write it. He likes it, he finds. It’s an outlet for a lot of things he didn’t realize he needed to express. He likes writing about strong, dashing men and delicate, good-hearted women. It’s such a turn from his experience of men being cold and ambitious and women being, well. Also cold and ambitious.

“You need more friends that aren’t in your fucking family,” Bronn tells him when Jaime mentions it one day. Jaime raises a glass of whiskey to that, laughing before he downs it, but it’s true. The Lannister family hasn’t provided him a very good example of what love can be, which makes his books the ultimate wish fulfillment.

His father has no idea. His sister has no idea. Tyrion knows, but Tyrion only knows about it in the abstract, and Jaime is pretty sure that Bronn has never actually read one of his books. Jaime writes under a pseudonym, Jamie Lyon, and he’s glad to be as anonymous as possible. He likes that people read his books, but he likes that he doesn’t _know_ anyone who reads them. It allows him to be seen and yet unseen at the same time. To exist in a kind of untouched bubble. He likes to read the reviews that people write of him, not knowing anything except his talent of putting words to the page. When people call him _my favorite author_ , he swells with pride.

“You’d think you’d turn it into getting laid,” Bronn says, in his dry, smugly irritating voice. They’re at Tyrion’s bar, celebrating the fact that Jaime’s close to finishing his next book. Jaime makes more money doing this than he ever made working for his father, and he actually _likes_ it, so every time he finishes another book, he’s briefly convinced that _this_ is the time everyone will realize he’s a fraud who doesn’t know what he’s writing about. Every book being published is a celebration, even though at this point they’re being churned out as quickly as he can write them.

“You’d think you’d know Jaime a bit better by now,” Tyrion says chidingly, sliding Bronn another drink with the kind of world-weary sigh that means he knows Bronn will not be _paying_ for this drink, either. “Jaime’s a one-woman man.”

“Jaime’s a no-woman man,” Bronn retorts.

“Just because I haven’t met her yet, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist,” Jaime says.

“You’re forty years old, mate, and you spend all your days writing masturbatory fantasies about rescuing women you’ll never have. When exactly are you planning to meet this girl?”

“Better men than you have tried to convince my big brother of his follies,” Tyrion says. He sends Jaime another glass, and Jaime sips it dutifully and smiles at both of them, trying to look blithe and unconcerned, even though Bronn’s words strike a chord that he doesn’t like.

“He’s talking about himself when he says ‘better men’,” he says.

“Of course he is,” Bronn replies. “I understand the little lunatic. It’s _you_ I don’t get.”

* * *

Jaime writes until daybreak that night, consumed by a desire to find something. Some elusive combination of words that will make him feel fulfilled. Sometimes, he expects to write something so stunningly good that it will put all his other work to shame. Something that even Bronn would be proud to read.

But it’s always the same. Dashing man. Delicate maiden. It’s the stuff that people like to read, and Jaime loves to write it, but sometimes he wonders if it’s all there is for him. Endlessly recreating his boyhood fantasies of knighthood. Doomed to never grow up, just like his father has always feared.

In the end, the dashing cowboy rides into town in a blaze of glory, and he finds his love—a saloon girl-slash-prostitute—and rescues her from the clutches of his dastardly cousin. He can imagine the faces of the villains and the minor characters so easily. They come to him fully formed, colorful pictures of people. But the dashing cowboy and his beautiful damsel are always cast in shadow. It makes it easier to imagine himself, he supposes. Saving some faceless woman of his dreams. It’s easier to project himself onto a character with no distinct personality traits. An ideal of manhood that he has never lived up to. A golden hero who isn’t swayed by greed or desire or hunger for anything but _righteousness_. Jaime has never been that man, but it’s easy to imagine that he could be, when he writes.

When he finishes the draft at last, he sits back and takes another long sip of his whiskey. The first time he finished a book, he was so proud of himself that he could hardly stop looking at it. Just looking at _the end_ on the page, every time he passed by his computer. Giddy with the knowledge that he had _created_ something. He had _done_ something. Now, it gets more unsatisfying every time. There’s something missing.

* * *

But, it’s a finished book, and that means that Bronn will be happy, and that means that his publisher will be happy, too. He sends it over to Bronn, who replies not with a _thanks_ , or a _well done_ , but a _we should get pissed_ that Jaime reluctantly agrees to. He starts outlining his next book the following morning, not liking to have too much idle time to himself in which he’s not writing, and when it’s time, he heads out.

One of his neighbors, Olenna, passes him on the stairs and hands over a thick envelope that was left downstairs for him, because it couldn’t fit into his box. He glances at it as they chat, and his good mood drops a bit when he sees that it’s postmarked from Storms End. It’s from Robert.

“He must have sent it just before he died,” he says to Bronn later, as they stare at the envelope on the table between them. Tyrion’s out of town, or they’d be at his bar, and Jaime would probably be bullied into opening the gift from their recently dead brother-in-law.

“A bit eerie, isn’t it?” Bronn asks. As always, he sounds both curious and completely uninterested at once. “How’s your sister handling it?”

“Fine, I think. She cracked a couple of jokes on the phone.”

“Gods, your sister is a cold-hearted bitch. Let it slip I’m single next time you talk to her, will you?”

“No.”

“I’m your agent.”

“And you’ll stay my agent. I don’t need another shit brother-in-law so soon after getting rid of the last one.”

Bronn laughs at that, and he picks up the envelope, shaking it slightly. Nothing makes a sound, and he tosses it back on the counter, disappointed.

“Well, whatever it is, hopefully it’s not enough to distract you from writing.”

“It won’t be,” Jaime promises.

* * *

Except, well. Several things happen, and within four hours, Jaime’s on a plane to Storms End.

First, he returns home to find his apartment ransacked. Nothing is stolen, but someone has obviously been searching for something.

Then, just as he’s about to call the police, Cersei calls and asks him if he’s received anything from Robert. Something that looks like a treasure map. Jaime opens the envelope from Robert and confirms that he has. It looks _fake_ , almost, like something you’d buy at a tourist trap, but Cersei sobs and begs him to meet her in Storms End with it.

“I’m in trouble,” she tells him. “Come at once, _please_ , Jaime. I need you. You can’t tell anyone about the map. You can’t tell anyone why you’re coming. Do you understand? Not Bronn, not anyone.”

Jaime has never been one to deny his sister anything, but they left things on uncertain terms when she left, and the idea of dropping everything and running to Storms End for her isn’t exactly an appealing one. He’d lost too much of himself in his twenties and early thirties, running around for his family and doing everything he could for them. Becoming someone in the process that he didn’t like very much. Being around Cersei has the same effect that being around his father always has, which is to say that he becomes the man they want him to be. It’s a man he can’t stand, and a man he has been glad to escape as much as he has been able to.

But she’s his sister, and he loves her, and he will never be the man from those books he keeps writing if he isn’t willing to go to great lengths to help people, and so he does not hesitate. He texts Bronn and Tyrion to tell them that he’s going to Storms End to support Cersei as she mourns the death of her husband, and then he shuts off his phone. He knows they will only judge him, and he doesn’t want to feel like he has to choose between doing this and losing their good opinion. She’s his _sister_. Tyrion hasn’t ever gotten along with her, but Jaime can’t just abandon her when she needs him.

* * *

He regrets that decision almost immediately.

Well, not _almost_ immediately. First there’s the flight, and that goes all right. He’s paranoid about the cargo he’s carrying, but it’s easy enough to slip in his briefcase along with a few notebooks and assorted papers. He dresses in the way he used to before he turned away from his family. An expensive suit a few years out of style. Tight, shining shoes that he loathes. He even brushes out his hair to keep it long and neat rather than a disheveled, curly mess like it has been lately. He feels like a different person, and he hates it, but it isn’t _terrible_ , yet.

At the airport, he boards a bus to Storms End. He pays little attention to things that might have tipped him off to what kind of shit he’d get into. The news reports about recent political uprisings. The warnings about it being unsafe to travel. He thinks about getting a private car, but that feels like it would draw too much attention to himself, and he’s trying not to be the sort of person that travels by private car anymore, so the bus, he decides, is good enough.

And _then_ is when he starts regretting his decision. Because the bus gets several hours out of the city, out into the still-untamed wilderness of this part of the country, and then it rounds a corner, and there is an on-fire, upside-down truck in the center of the narrow dirt road.

The bus driver immediately begins backing up to escape, shouting at them all to get down. There’s an _amount_ of panic from the other passengers, but not nearly as much as Jaime would expect, considering his heart starts racing the moment he sees the flames. He covers his head and clutches his briefcase tight, and for the next several minutes it is as if he is somewhere else entirely, watching his life through someone else’s eyes.

The bus driver slams into the guardrail behind him, gives up, opens the door, and flees, starting to run back the way he came. Most of the passengers panic and try to follow, shoving open the back door when the front one gets clogged. Jaime holds his briefcase to his chest and tries to breathe, hiding still, ducked down beneath his seat.

There’s a voice on a megaphone, announcing themselves as the Bloody Mummers, demanding that they turn over all their possessions and that they will be allowed to live. Jaime has heard of them, in a vague enough way. He knows that they’re one of a few bandit gangs operating out of this part of Westeros, which has been in upheavel for generations. He knows that they’re not the sorts who will take kindly to him requesting that he be allowed to keep the treasure map. They’ll laugh at him and shoot him if he tries. But it’s _Cersei_. He can’t give it up.

He finds it within himself to get up, hurry to the back door of the bus. The people who had taken off with the driver are already running back down the path. Another truck is coming at them, with more of the Bloody Mummers in it. Jaime scurries back, his terrible shoes sliding in the gravel and dirt on the side of the road. The man with the megaphone is shouting at everyone to drop their possessions again, and then suddenly he is dead. Jaime looks up to the hill, and he sees that a second group of people have arrived, melting out of the trees above and opening fire on the Bloody Mummers down below. He drops to the ground and pulls himself under the bus, his briefcase still held tight against his chest. It’s only then that the adrenaline slows down enough that he understands what’s happening, and still it’s too much of a blur to make any sense of. The only thing he can think about, the only thing that can matter, is the briefcase. If these people get ahold of the briefcase…

The second group from the hill have managed to get down, and they run past his hiding spot as they fire at the men who ambushed the bus. Jaime _knew_ it was bad here. He heard the news reports and then promptly _ignored_ the news reports, like an absolute idiot. If Cersei ever finds out about how careless he was... Somehow he figured it wouldn’t be like _this_. Or maybe he just assumed that he would be able to avoid the worst of it. Things _do_ seem to work out for him. Maybe his luck has just finally run out.

He is the only one who has chosen the space beneath the bus as a hiding place, and he is able to wriggle between the two front wheels to peer out between them and between the tufts of grass that keep him feeling relatively hidden away. The group from the hill are lead by a tall man in a black tank top and cargo pants. He’s wearing fingerless gloves and carrying an assault rifle. He has short, slightly wavy blonde hair, and arms that look powerfully strong as he swings his gun around to take on another wave of the men who ambushed the bus. Jaime can’t help it; he’s already mentally taking notes. It’s just like nothing is touching him, nothing _reaching_ him. He can still watch this man fight and admire him like a writer, and the fear he should be feeling as a potential victim is very far away.

Bullets spray into the gravel very near Jaime’s head, and reality comes crashing back. He scrambles backward, dragging his briefcase with him, back to the center of the bus. He hears more shouting, more shooting. He scoots further and further, and suddenly is slammed into by someone rolling under the bus with him. There’s a struggle, and Jaime nearly shouts, but the person rolls atop him as much as they can in this cramped space, and they slam a hand over his mouth. It’s only then that he recognizes the man from the hill. The one he was just watching.

But no, not the man from the hill. The woman from the hill. Tall and broad and muscled, but he can see her clearer now, shadowed as she is under the bus. She holds one finger to her lips, and Jaime nods, stunned. She releases his mouth, still half-atop him, pressing him into the gravel. She looks him up and down with something like scorn. The way he clutches his briefcase. The way he’s dressed. Maybe even the way he looks. She meets his eyes. Hers are very blue.

“Stay hidden,” she advises in a low, steady voice, and he nods again. She reloads her pistol; she must have rolled under here to do that. She starts to roll back out, but her holster is caught on something on the underside of the bus, and Jaime manages to free her, wriggling his fingers up into the metal and prying it loose. “Thanks,” she says, and Jaime nods, and then she’s gone.

The woman and the rest of her team make quick work of the Mummers after that, and then she calls for Jaime to come out from under the bus. He does, still holding his briefcase in front of him like a shield. The woman isn’t holding her gun any longer, but there are two smaller, younger people with her, and they both have their guns trained on Jaime, unwavering.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” asks one of them, a young woman with a voice that drips with smug sarcasm.

“No,” Jaime admits.

“Figured. The locals know how to scatter when the Mummers raid their transportation. You just _hid_.”

“I…don’t know where I am,” Jaime says. The young woman snorts with amusement and maybe some disgust.

“That’s pretty fucking plain, man. Brie, what’re we gonna do with him?”

The woman from beneath the bus straightens in the act of pulling identification from one of the bodies of the Mummers. She turns and looks at Jaime, again so dismissive that it would probably feel shitty if Jaime wasn’t still mostly unable to feel anything but confused alarm.

“Where are you headed?” she asks.

“Storms End,” Jaime replies. The woman considers.

“We’ve got a job to do here,” the younger woman reminds her. “He can find his own way.”

“The Mummers will get him if we leave him here,” argues the man.

“Well, maybe next time he won’t dress like a rich fuck and make himself a target.”

“Arya, that’s not…”

“I can pay you,” Jaime finds himself saying. The younger woman, Arya, turns her gaze to him, one eyebrow lifting.

“How much?”

“Five hundred gold dragons.”

Arya snorts, waving her hand to dismiss him.

“Fucking insulting. Leave him to die.”

“A thousand,” Jaime blurts.

The young man tilts his head to the side, looking Jaime over. “Fifteen hundred,” he says. That’s almost everything Jaime brought with him. He nods anyway.

“Weak,” Arya scoffs. “Should’ve bartered more. Gendry’s soft. He might’ve taken a thousand eventually.” She walks a little closer to Jaime, narrowing her eyes in his direction. “What’s in the suitcase?”

“Paperwork,” he says.

“What _kind_ of paperwork?”

“It’s for my sister. She’s stranded in Storms End. Her husband just died. I need to get it to her.”

The lie comes easily to him. Lying always has. Even before he started writing. Maybe _especially_ before he started writing, when he was working for his father and always had to be prepared to answer difficult questions about the company. Lying is a Lannister trait, and one he normally wishes he was well free of, but he is grateful for it now. Channeling his brother and sister is the only way to keep the treasure map safe. These people saved him, and he supposes he is grateful for that. People who want his money are easy to understand, and they’re easy to work with, because money is something a Lannister is never without. But he won’t trust them, either. Someone allied with you for money will always choose _more_ money when they realize there’s an option.

Arya glances at the taller woman, who’s looking at Jaime with open fascination. He tries not to stare back in the same way. He supposes they are probably both used to being stared at, for different reasons. Under the bus, it was harder to see her harsher features, but they’re impossible to avoid in this light.

“He’s full of shit,” Arya says. “You know that, right? The Mummers wanted _something_ on this bus, and I’d bet my life it’s this rich fucker and whatever he’s got in that case.”

“A thousand,” the tall woman says, ignoring her smaller companion. “And I’ll take you to Storms End myself.”

Arya and the boy both groan loudly at her.

“ _I’m_ soft?” the boy asks.

“Unbelievable,” Arya mutters. Both of them look at Jaime hungrily, and for the first time, he feels _angry_ with Cersei for this. What has she gotten him into?

“Thank you,” he says, trying to smile his most charming smile. He’s not sure it works. The tall woman looks disappointed already. Like she can’t believe _herself_.

“Arya, Gendry, head back to base and tell the others what happened. The Mummers are getting bolder.”

“They’re not getting bolder. They’re looking for _him_. You know I’m right.”

“If that’s true, then we certainly don’t want them to have him, do we?” the tall woman asks, pointed and patient. Arya subsides, nodding. Begrudging. The tall woman approaches Jaime. Standing so straight, with her shoulders thrown back, she’s taller than him, and he feels it. They could kill him right now, take his suitcase and the treasure map, and leave his body here to rot. The other two probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. It’s only her, this woman. She’s the only one standing between him and an early grave.

“Are you sure about this?” Arya asks. The tall woman nods.

“Go on,” she says, not breaking eye contact with Jaime. The other two go, clearly unhappy, muttering to each other as they disappear back into the trees, melting out of sight with the kind of ease that tells Jaime they’ve both been doing this for a while, no matter how young they look.

“Thank you,” Jaime manages to say.

“Don’t thank me until we’re in Storms End. And you’ll be thanking me with money.”

“I will,” Jaime promises. “I’m good for it.”

“You’d better be. I’m risking my neck to help you.”

“Yes, your friends made that clear.”

“They’re not my friends. They’re my colleagues.”

“Seemed to me it’s more like you’re their babysitter.”

The tall woman gives him a doubtful look, and then glances back at the briefcase again. Jaime holds it tighter to his chest.

“If whatever’s in there is so important, we’d better hurry. You’re in a lot more trouble than you realize. The Mummers won’t stop until they have you.”

She sounds like she’s warning him, like she’s telling him he should just give her the briefcase and go back to his life. But that isn’t Jaime. He thinks of Cersei sobbing on the phone. He thinks of the way she’d begged him. 

“All right,” he says. “What should I call you?”

She blinks at him in surprise. It’s the first time she has looked unsettled in the whole of their brief acquaintance. The shooting and the killing didn’t make a dent, but this one moment of conversation…

_She’s just like him_ , he realizes. The man from all his books. They always start out wary and unused to human connection. They always start out strong and silent and untouchable. Confused by any amount of affection. Something settles heavily on his chest. Some feeling he can’t name. Admiration, maybe. Realization. _It’s her._

“Brienne,” she says, and then she looks further surprised that she has spoken.

“Jaime,” he replies. She nods. She looks down at his outstretched hand with amusement, but she doesn’t take it. She slings a backpack over her shoulder.

“All right, Jaime,” she says. “Let’s get you to your sister.”


	10. Her Best Friend's Boyfriend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Best Friend's Partner AU. Brienne/Catelyn/Jaime with eventual Brienne/Jaime. Brienne is used to her quiet crushes on people who will never want her in return. She's used to wanting what she can't have. What she ISN'T used to is being wanted in return. Especially not by two people at once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was prompted "best friend's partner AU" on tumblr, and I spent a not-insignificant amount of time wondering how to write such a thing without making it painful and angsty. And then i was like "oh, duh. Stable triad!" So here we are! I wish I could be the kind of person who could take this premise and make it super sexy, but it's me, and so it's mostly just soft lmao.

Brienne has a habit of developing crushes on unattainable people. Maybe it’s a _bad_ habit, but Brienne has come to view it as a good thing anyway. Because the thing about habits is that you get used to them. You work around them. You develop a kind of immunity to them. Sure, it’s a bad habit. Sure, she’s causing herself pain with it. But she knows how to handle these crushes when they happen, because they happen so often. It would be a terrible thing to always be surprised by them, or destroyed by them. Instead, she absorbs them, endures them, and learns to live with them.

Renly was her first, and he was a blueprint that she carried with her into the future. He found out, somehow, and he was sweet about it in a cloying way that made her feel too seen and too pathetic. After that, she got better at hiding it. She stopped expecting her crushes to go anywhere, or to mean anything to the people she was crushing on. Brienne knows what she looks like, and she knows that her tastes line up perfectly with the exact kind of people who are too beautiful to pay her any kind of _good_ attention. She also knows that it’s not _their_ fault that they’re not attracted to her. And she would rather be their friend than nothing at all.

On the whole, Brienne prefers men. She likes gentle men, pretty men, men with kind smiles and men with gallant manners. She likes men who will never like her, and that’s the way it has always been. But sometimes, with some _women_ , there’s the same kind of feeling. She isn’t sure if she’d call herself bi. She’s not really sure how it works. She thinks she has a preference for men, so it doesn’t feel entirely equal, but there’s no denying the way she feels when she looks at certain women.

So it’s good, really, that Brienne has always had this habit of falling for unobtainable people. It’s good because she becomes as immune as possible in the years leading up to college, and it prepares her for Catelyn, and it prepares her for Catelyn’s boyfriend, Jaime.

* * *

It’s not something she ever consciously thinks about, her crush on Catelyn. She made it through four years of college as Catelyn’s roommate, and it was always something a little bit on the backburner. Other crushes came and went, but Catelyn was always around, so her crush never turned into a festering wound, and it never faded enough to be forgotten. She’d go through weeks without thinking about it, and then Catelyn would jump up onto her bed and nestle into her side, and it would be like, _oh_. _Right_. Catelyn acted older than all their friends, the self-proclaimed “mom friend”, and something about her gentle care would make Brienne’s heart hurt, just a bit. Catelyn was sharp and defensive towards anyone who tried to get at Brienne with harsh words. She was careful with Brienne’s feelings, but never in a way that felt like she was being condescending. She listened whenever Brienne could be prodded to share her feelings. She never made Brienne feel like she was foolish or reaching too far or too naïve. Of _course_ Brienne had a bit of a crush on her. Who wouldn’t?

For almost all four of their college years, Catelyn was dating Ned Stark, who was a nice enough boy. A bit boring, but steady. Catelyn never said why they broke up, but it was soon after college ended, right before she and Brienne were set to move into their first apartment together, and Brienne was almost relieved. She hadn’t exactly been looking forward to finding a new roommate if Catelyn decided to move in with Ned. Four years of dating in college seemed like it _had_ to lead to an engagement eventually, and she’d been wary about the apartment from the start because of it.

Catelyn refused to discuss what happened, refused to tell Brienne why she and Ned broke up. It didn’t really matter, anyway. Brienne would be there for her regardless.

* * *

Catelyn is the type of girl who doesn’t like to stay single for long. She’s great at being in a relationship. She’s nurturing and caring but never allows the other person to walk over her needs. Brienne often thinks that if anyone ever agrees to date her, she’d like to be the sort of girlfriend that Catelyn is. She’s not sure she’d be able to pull it off, but she would love to be that sort of person instead of her staid, uncomfortable self.

After a little more than a month of being single, Jaime starts coming around.

“We dated in high school,” Catelyn says the first time Jaime’s supposed to come over to take her out to get something to eat. “But we decided to break up for college, because we both wanted to see what else was out there. It’s not going to be anything serious, but we were always good friends, so we figured…” She seems like she’s expecting Brienne to judge her, but Brienne just smiles.

She judges Catelyn even less when the door opens and Jaime steps in.

* * *

Brienne isn’t sure what a serious relationship looks like if the one that Catelyn and Jaime have isn’t serious. They spend all kinds of time together. They go on dates. They take short trips together. They seem to be having a lot of fun when they do. Catelyn’s relationship with Ned was always very, well. Staid. _Serious_. Jaime is anything _but_ serious, but it still seems _committed_ , this path they’ve decided on. Catelyn doesn’t go on any dates with other people. Brienne sometimes gets halfway to working up the courage to ask if Jaime’s seeing anyone else, but she can’t quite do it. Catelyn seems happy, and she was so devastated after breaking it off with Ned. Brienne’s just glad she’s not still in that tailspin.

It’s just. Well.

Jaime.

The crush on Catelyn, Brienne had gotten used to. It was just kind of there, gently reminding her every time they interacted. Sometimes it even felt _nice_. It never bothered Brienne when Catelyn was with Ned, because it never felt like Brienne was missing out on anything. She didn’t have any sort of feelings at all for Ned, so the awkward distance they maintained was just fine by her. And Catelyn was always just as kind. Just as attentive. Sometimes it felt like Brienne and Ned were _both_ dating Catelyn, and she didn’t mind so much that there was nothing physical between her and her roommate, because it was like they were in an emotional relationship anyway. But with Jaime…

It’s just different. Maybe it’s just that Jaime is the most beautiful man Brienne has ever seen. Maybe it’s just that Jaime laughs at everything and doesn’t seem to understand how to be sincere. He teases Brienne at first in a way that makes her bristle until she realizes that he teases Catelyn just as badly, and teases himself worst of all. He has trouble with boundaries, often slinging an arm across Brienne’s shoulders while she’s cooking in the kitchen, leaning in close to see what she’s making. If she sits next to him on the couch, he’s always leaning closer to talk quietly under the sound from the television. He gets her attention by clapping her on the back, or touching her arm, never just saying her name like a normal person. At first she thinks he’s doing it on purpose to fluster her, knowing how attractive she finds him, but as time goes by she has to concede that he might just…be _like_ that. Naturally kind of flirty.

It doesn’t seem to bother Catelyn, which makes Brienne feel a bit better. And Catelyn doesn’t act any differently than she had when she was dating Ned. She’s the same as ever, and Brienne can’t help but notice the way that Jaime responds to Catelyn’s kindness the same way that Brienne does. Like a sunflower turning towards her, always wanting more. It makes her sad for a reason she can’t really figure out. Sad for him and sad for her, too. Catelyn is one of those people who attracts people who haven’t had enough affection in their lives, Brienne has always thought. She exudes warmth in a way that people like Brienne and Jaime have seen little of, and they always want to soak it up. So it isn’t like Brienne resents Jaime for taking some of Catelyn’s attention or love away. She knows what it’s like to be under the force of Catelyn’s spell, and there’s more than enough room for the both of them.

Because that’s the thing of it, right? She’s used to it. She’s used to having feelings for Catelyn, and she’s used to falling a little bit in love with unattainable people. She’s used to wanting more than she can have. The problem is maybe that she hasn’t ever been _truly_ in love before, and so she clings to these feelings of love that she knows can’t ever go anywhere, _won’t_ ever go anywhere. It’s easier to cling to them than to admit that she’s never actually felt it.

* * *

Which is why she agrees to go on a date with Hyle Hunt, a kid she knew in high school. He was a dick in high school, and he’s not much kinder on the date. More self-aware. Apologetic in a way she didn’t expect. He’s funny, at least. Not quite her sense of humor, but he manages to coax a few laughs out of her. It’s easy to imagine a world where she goes home with him. Allows him to fuck her. Dates him. Maybe marries him and has a few children. That’s what _he_ seems to want, too. It would be easy to say yes, and give up on her dreams of romance. She’s always known that they were likely not to happen to her anyway, so she’s not sure why the idea is so abhorrent to her.

She thanks Hyle politely for the date, and when they separate, she determines not to call him again.

It’s odd that she’s so upset about it, after. She’s not sure why. It just feels like she should be better at this, or more open to things that she isn’t sure she wants, or _different_. She should know better than to expect more. Hyle wasn’t even _that_ bad. By the time she gets home to the apartment, she’s convinced that she made a mistake.

Jaime and Catelyn are on the couch watching a movie, but Catelyn pauses it eagerly when Brienne enters. Brienne’s already fighting back tears, but their anticipation and excitement when they both turn toward her to hear all about it is a little too much. She squeaks out something about how the date was _fine_ but she’s going to turn in early, and then she goes and takes a long shower, and then she crawls into bed.

The door creaks open ten minutes later, and Catelyn is looking at her with concern. Brienne stares back at her, and she can see the moment Catelyn reads everything on her face.

“Oh, Brienne,” Catelyn says, and she gets into bed beside Brienne, crawling under the covers, kissing her on the cheek and laying her head on the pillow beside Brienne’s. “What happened?”

Brienne starts talking, and then she cannot stop. She has never bared her feelings like this to Catelyn before. She has never bared her feelings like this to anyone. She is halfway through when a shadow falls over the doorway, and Jaime is there, checking on them, his expression just as concerned as Catelyn’s had been. Catelyn looks at Brienne for permission, and so does Jaime, and Brienne nods. Jaime climbs into bed so he’s behind her. She’s sandwiched between them, and Catelyn is holding Brienne’s hand with one hand and gently stroking Brienne’s face with the other, and Jaime has his fingers curled around Brienne’s upper arm, his thumb working idly over the sleeve of her shirt, and Brienne nearly breaks down completely from the warmth of it. She’s never felt warmth like this before. She’s never felt so safe.

She tells them everything, and they listen, and Catelyn tells her over and over again that she’s worthy of so much more than she thinks. Jaime murmurs agreements but mostly just lends his weight, behind her, keeping her protected. Shielding her back while Catelyn guards her front. Brienne isn’t sure when she falls asleep, but she wakes up once in the night, and both of them are still there, with her. Both of them nestled close.

* * *

For the next few weeks, they test the waters, though of course Brienne doesn’t know that’s what they’re doing. They invite her along when they go on dates, insisting that they _aren’t_ dates and that she doesn’t have to feel weird about going with them. Catelyn will tuck her arm through Brienne’s, and Jaime will pull her closer to whisper something to her when they go to the movies. They always make room for Brienne on the couch when she tries to escape to her room to stay out of their way. They seem so sincere that more often than not, Brienne joins them, though she’s convinced that they just feel sorry for her.

When she finally expresses that, inching back down the hallway after they make room between them on the couch and both ask her to sit, Jaime and Catelyn exchange a glance.

“We’ve been…meaning to talk to you about something,” Catelyn says.

What they say—what they say they _want_ —seems impossible.

“Me?” she asks, at least twice. Jaime laughs the first time, but he doesn’t laugh the second. He touches her arm, instead, and his eyes are very big and earnest like this, and they’re so tempting to believe.

“You,” he says. There’s a firmness and a steadiness to him that he usually seems to lack.

“You’re my best friend,” Catelyn says. “And I love you.”

“And so do I,” Jaime says.

She can’t believe either of them, but she can’t _dis_ believe them, either. Not with the nervous way they look at her, waiting for her judgement. It occurs to her that it must be very brave. For Catelyn and for Jaime both. Unless they’re making fun of her, somehow. Making her into a joke. But Catelyn…Brienne knows Catelyn. And more than that, Catelyn knows Brienne. She knows that a joke like this is one of the things that she wouldn’t be able to forgive. And Catelyn _wouldn’t_. She just wouldn’t.

And Jaime…Brienne knows Jaime, too. It’s a surprise to realize it, but she does. These past few months have been filled with him. He’s always there, smiling at her. It would have been intolerable if she hadn’t long ago resigned herself to not being the kind of person who has affections returned, and now it might be intolerable again, now that he’s looking at her and smiling nervously at her and apparently _wanting_ her.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“If you’re not comfortable, it’s okay,” Catelyn says, putting her hand on Brienne’s arm briefly and then taking it away as if she’s afraid she’d frightened Brienne. “I don’t want you to feel like…”

“I didn’t say that,” Brienne says quickly.

“Then what don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand why you’d pick me.”

“Because you’re our friend,” Catelyn says, as if it’s obvious. “Because we care about you a lot.”

“Because we want you,” Jaime agrees.

Brienne hardly understands what she’s doing, but she nods.

* * *

Catelyn, of course, is the one who sets up boundaries immediately. She writes them down on a white board that’s stuck to the fridge, but Brienne’s relieved to find after the first two weeks that she hasn’t needed help defining anything. It’s casual, what they’re doing, but they’re not seeing anybody else. Jaime and Catelyn use the word love, but Brienne understands quickly that it isn’t the kind of love that Catelyn had for Ned. The passionate, singular focused kind of love that broke her heart when it was over. It doesn’t really feel temporary, not the way Brienne has always thought of when people said they were dating someone _casually_. But it doesn’t feel permanent, either, and that makes it easier.

It’s easy when Catelyn sees her in the kitchen and kisses her on the lips for the first time. Innocent and fun and a bit flirty in a way that makes Brienne’s heart lurch. It’s easy when Jaime comes up behind her when she’s cooking and puts an arm around her as he always did, but this time kisses the skin of her shoulder where it’s exposed by the low neckline of her shirt. It’s easy when Brienne comes home after a long day of work and finds them making room for her on the couch already.

It’s a tangle of limbs at night in whichever bed is most convenient. It’s not sex, not at first, because Brienne is afraid and uncomfortable with her own body, and because Catelyn was very clear in the rules that they wouldn’t until she could ask for it fully. When it _is_ sex, it’s a slow kind of transition that starts with Catelyn and Jaime focusing their every attention on Brienne, knowing that it’s her first time and knowing that she’s so nervous. Afterward, they both hold her, and Brienne feels surrounded again. Safe. Wanted. Loved. It’s almost too much.

* * *

She wonders about it sometimes. About how it happened and how it’s going to end. She doesn’t know anyone in real life who’s ever been in a relationship like this, and she’d never even been in a one-on-one relationship before, so she doesn’t really know how typical they are. Jaime moves in with them after a few months. Some nights they all sleep together. Some nights one of them will want to sleep alone, and the other two will sleep together. The first time Jaime sleeps in her bed without Catelyn, and the first time he makes her come with his tongue beneath her sheets and his wicked, satisfied smile, Brienne feels like she has gotten away with something. Stolen something. But that feeling doesn’t last long.

She hasn’t stolen anything. It has been freely given.

* * *

It does come to an end eventually, as Brienne had feared it would, but even _that_ seems too easy, once it’s done. Ned comes back into their lives in the form of a few text messages exchanged with Catelyn, and then a few phone calls, and then a single date. Catelyn is upfront with Jaime and Brienne the entire time, but both of them know there’s every chance that Catelyn will go back with him. Not because she doesn’t love them, and not because she wants to hurt them. Brienne understands that. Jaime does, too. Still, the two of them are strangely somber when Catelyn is on her date. They watch some TV show that only the two of them like, that they never get the chance to watch when Catelyn is home. It should feel like a treat, but it doesn’t. It feels like a consolation.

Brienne is happy for Catelyn, when Catelyn decides to get back with Ned. She reminds herself that this has always been temporary. But she has lived with Catelyn for so long that even if they _weren’t_ sleeping together, and even if there _weren’t_ real feelings there, she would be sad to see her friend move out.

When she does, she leaves a hole that Brienne isn’t sure can be filled. Catelyn will always love them, and she will remain their friend. Brienne isn’t worried about that. But the daily spaces that she used to inhabit are empty now, and it will take some time to adjust.

The day Catelyn moves out, Jaime’s the one who drives her final load of stuff to her new apartment with Ned, and Brienne is left alone in their place. She tidies her room, and the living room, trying to fill the gaps that Catelyn’s possessions left. When Jaime comes back, she’s almost surprised, though she realizes immediately that she shouldn’t be. Brienne was the third person to enter the triangle. She always assumed she would be the first person to leave it. That Catelyn and Jaime would exit as a unit to some other adventure. But all his stuff is still here, and he never said…

“Will you take Catelyn’s room?” she finds herself asking. Cagey and a bit nervous. She doesn’t know how to ask for what she wants. She never has. Jaime’s looking at her with that same nervousness in his expression. “Or will you…?”

“It’s up to you,” he says, by the door. He looks too beautiful, too sharply beautiful, alone with her. She has had the thought sometimes, when they’re together without Catelyn. Catelyn serves as a buffer between them. When Catelyn’s there, it makes sense. Without her, they’re Jaime and Brienne, and they are too different. Anyone who looks at the two of them…

It’s hard not to feel a bit abandoned by Catelyn, for a moment. She filled this gap between them so well, and now that she’s gone, it seems to Brienne that Jaime will finally break free from whatever spell Catelyn put them both under. He will look at Brienne’s broad, homely face, and he will realize that out of love for Catelyn he has been enduring this other woman. Bigger than him. Uglier than him. Not nearly as exciting as him.

“I want you to stay,” she admits. Jaime has a kind heart. She knows that, at least. He won’t laugh at her for saying what she wants aloud, even if it’s not what he can give her. His expression softens. He steps forward, towards her.

“I want to stay too,” he says. He takes off his jacket, and he puts it on the chair where he always used to. Just the same. “I know it was about Cat, for you…”

“And I know it was about Cat for you,” Brienne points out.

“At first, yes. But I hope you’ll believe me. I want to stay with you. _For_ you.”

It is almost too much for her to believe, but Brienne _does_ believe him.

“Then stay,” she says, and he exhales, breathes out. A relief crossing over his features. She’s still afraid, she thinks, in some distant way. But she can face that fear if it ever comes to pass. Everything else about this has been so perfect. Maybe there’s hope that this next step can be just as good.


	11. Brienne the Bodyguard, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tywin insists that Brienne has to wear a dress to an upcoming gala.

There are things that are easy for Jaime to learn about Brienne Tarth, and then there are the things that are more difficult.

She hates him. That one’s easy. She’s read the articles, he supposes. Those deep dives into his family’s history and their obscene wealth and their cruel business practices. She knows Tywin’s public image and she assumes, not incorrectly, that his private image is the same ghoulish picture.

She likely assumes that Jaime is the same. It doesn’t necessarily bother him. She worked for Catelyn Stark, of course, who likes Jaime well enough but feels honor-bound to qualify her every positive statement about him with a negative one. Catelyn’s a bit more flexible than her dour husband was, but she seems to have inherited some of Ned’s implacable sense of justice along with Winterfell after his death. Brienne must have heard all sorts of horror stories about the Lannister family, and Jaime being “not that bad, considering” probably didn’t seem like much of an endorsement from the Stark widow. Not for a young, idealistic girl like Brienne.

Because that’s another thing that’s easy to learn: she’s idealistic. He sees it in moments. Little flickers across her otherwise-stony face. Cersei was right when she said that Brienne is good at her job. Good at her _career_. He can understand why she would have chosen it. Her expression is carved from marble, along with the rest of her. A solid slab of a woman, molded by a master who was apparently experimenting in androgyny and then forgot about the experiment when they got to her eyes. They follow Jaime everywhere. Behind dark sunglasses or openly damning. Big and blue. She can’t hide her expression when she has them exposed. It’s the one flaw in the image she wants to project. It’s her only feature that no human being alive could call a physical flaw at the same time. Jaime finds her fascinating.

Damn Cersei, damn Tyrion, damn even Tywin, who apparently recognized for once that he was shit at something and handed it off to the two people who might actually have a shot at delivering something Jaime might want. Damn all of them for understanding that his ideological opposition to her hiring only stretches so far as his entertainment, because he spends the first week on almost good behavior, fascinated by her refusal to crack when he’s watching. He goes to the meetings his father sets up for him, primarily so he can watch Brienne react quietly to the horrendous shit that all the Lannister Corp partners say, because they’re a bunch of terrible men who care little for the people their terrible decisions hurt. He does a few television appearances at his father’s direction, apparently trying to prove to the men behind the threats that he’s not frightened. He spends the whole time rigid with certainty that _this_ is when it’s going to happen, but it never does. Brienne stands by, ready for anything, her hand on the gun at her hip, her eyes always roaming. He watches her there, too.

As the days pass, he watches her more and more, trying to see beneath the surface somehow. He tries talking to her sometimes, because he’s often alone with her, and because he’s never met a silence he didn’t immediately try to fill with whatever thought pops into his head. She’s either gruffly silent or gruffly annoyed, but either way she never bites. Never banters back. Never insults him. He doesn’t push her as far as he could, because he doesn’t _want_ her to leave, but he finds the buttons that he _could_ push, if he had to. He knows where they are. He can see them easily.

She’s not as solid as she wants everyone to think. That’s one of the things that it takes a little while to figure out, and it’s the thing he’s the most careful with, because he doesn’t _want_ her to be hurt because of him. Because of his words or because of his actions or because of the fact that his family thinks he’s more important than her. He doesn’t want to hurt her just because he’s in a shit mood, and he doesn’t want to hurt her just because she’s the only person in the room with him half the time.

Still, he tucks them away. Like he knows he’s going to have to use them eventually.

* * *

It’s the gala that changes things, but it starts a bit before that. It’s just that Jaime doesn’t notice until after.

It starts for sure when Tywin tells Brienne that she needs to wear a dress.

He doesn’t address her by name, but at least he does her the courtesy of looking at her when he’s speaking to her. That’s above and beyond for him. He says it like an afterthought: Jaime is expected to attend, and therefore his bodyguard will also be there, but she must dress appropriately. Jaime knows she’s going to get blotchy and red, and of course she does. He pulls his eyes away from her.

“She’s already been photographed with me everywhere in the past few weeks in a suit and tie. Do you think a _dress_ will fool anyone into thinking she’s not my bodyguard?”

“It’s a formal event.”

“And she’s a bodyguard who wears a suit every day.”

He smiles at his father, waiting. Tywin likes to hint at things rather than say them. _In this day and age_ , he’s fond of complaining. _Everyone takes things too seriously_. Like insisting on a fucking dress code isn’t taking things too seriously. Like people wanting to _change_ things is unsightly, but a rigid insistence on tradition isn’t.

“You will wear a gown. Is that clear?” Tywin asks Brienne, ignoring his son entirely.

“Yes, sir,” Brienne replies, before Jaime can make a crack about _that_ , too.

* * *

“You don’t have to listen to him,” Jaime says. Brienne’s sitting in the backseat of the limo across from him. Jaime has closed the partition, as he always does, because he doesn’t want to have to listen to Cleos pretending that they’re friends just because they’re cousins.

“He’s my boss.”

“I’m your boss.”

“And he’s _your_ boss. So he’s my boss.”

It’s the closest thing to _sass_ she’s ever shown him, and he’s delighted. He can tell the moment she regrets it.

“She _does_ have a spine. Fascinating. And you’re trying to use it to stand up to _me_ when I’m trying to stand up for _you_.”

“I don’t need you, or anyone, to stand up for me.”

“No, apparently not. You’re doing quite admirably at making sure that you spend the evening as miserable as possible.” She glares at him, and he knows immediately what nerve he has struck. “Don’t pretend you _want_ to wear a gown. Don’t pretend you won’t spend the whole evening torturing yourself about the fit when you pull something off the rack at _Hill’s_ that’s going to be too short and too tight around the shoulders. Don’t pretend you _want_ to do it just because you have this absurd need to try and make yourself amenable to my father.”

“I,” she starts, and there’s more venom in that single word than he’s ever heard from her. _I hate you. I wish you’d shut up. I quit_. Jaime waits for the end of the sentence, but it never comes. Not as it started, anyway. She swallows, breathes. “I will do what is required of me.”

“All that’s required of you is saving my life. You can do that far better in a suit. I bet Catelyn Stark never made you wear a dress.”

Brienne looks over at him, surprised.

“Yes, she did,” she says.

“ _Really_?”

“She was trying to be…she was trying to help me.”

“Did it? Help?”

Brienne hesitates, almost cringing away from the idea of saying less-than-glowing about her previous employer.

“I don’t think so,” she admits, quietly. “She…she was kind enough. The style she picked was…flattering, I suppose, but…” She hesitates again, clearly unused to expressing _anything_ about what she wants for herself. Jaime feels something strange building inside him. Some kind of want he’s never felt before. Not lust, not affection. Just…she has no idea, does she? She has no idea how to ask for anything she wants. “I told her that I wasn’t…opposed. To dresses. I just didn’t think I ever looked good in them. She thought a plain style suited best, and she was probably right, but…”

Jaime presses the button to open the partition just enough so he can bark, “change of plan. We’re going to Donyse.” He closes it again before Cleos can say anything. Brienne is already looking at him, waiting for an explanation when he turns to look at her. “She’s the finest dressmaker in Kings Landing,” he says. Her eyes open wide. Horrified. 

“ _Mr. Lannister_ ,” she insists, and he clucks his tongue in disappointment.

“You’re not buying last year’s fashion at _Hill’s_ , and you’re not wearing a dress that won’t even reach your ankles. You’re not humiliating yourself for my father’s sake, or because you think _duty_ means following even the stupidest orders. I know you hate me. I know you hate my family. You should. We’re all willing to let you take a bullet for me. If you insist on staying, at least let me do something nice for you once in a while.”

“I can’t…” she starts. She’s sputtering, annoyed, overwhelmed by the speed at which this is moving. She sounds vaguely humiliated when she manages to grind out, “I can’t _afford_ that kind of…”

He throws his head back and laughs, and laughs harder when she goes mulishly silent.

“You think I’m going to bully you into buying an expensive dress and then leave you with the tab? Gods, you really _do_ have a low opinion of me, don’t you? I can’t imagine why. I’m going to pay for it, you daft woman. If father wants you to dress the part, then we’re going to make sure you dress the part, but you’re not humiliating yourself for him. That’s how he wins, and I _hate_ when he wins. If you’re so sure that this is the dutiful thing to do, then I’ll make it easy: this isn’t a request.”

Brienne glares at him, knowing he has trapped her with her own fool honor. She nods. Her chin jerks up and then down again when she does it. Her jaw ticking with tension. He smiles even wider at her.

* * *

When they get to Donyse’s, it is immediately unsurprising, the way Brienne acts. She’s suspicious, distrustful. She often is, of many things, but to watch her turn her suspicions toward Donyse, a sweet woman Jaime has known for years, is singularly amusing.

“She used to be a _Septa_ , Brienne,” he hisses to his bodyguard when Donyse leaves their private consultation room to grab some of the fabric to show Brienne what she’s thinking.

“Why’d she _stop_ being a Septa?” Brienne asks, and Jaime laughs as if she has made a charming joke, though he knows it was a serious question. It was the exact kind of question Brienne would ask. Part of him wishes she was a bit more trusting, but he knows he wouldn’t find her nearly as amusing if she was.

She refuses to leave the room to try on the dresses Donyse brings in, and she just as steadfastly refuses to allow Jaime into the changing room with her, so Jaime decides to compromise by both undressing to his underthings and then allowing Donyse to tie his tie around his eyes as he lounges on the small settee.

“You look ridiculous,” Brienne tells him, and he laughs at her.

“Well, you were _acting_ ridiculous. It’s a nice change of pace for us, isn’t it?”

Her silence makes him think that his crack about her looks was perhaps a step too far, until he hears a small snort of amusement and the rustle of fabric.

“As your bodyguard, I can’t help but think this a bit naïve.”

“What’s naïve?”

“Allowing two women to tie you up and strip you half-naked.”

“I’m beginning to understand you, I think. I thought you were quite humorless once, but you just have a way of speaking. You’re quite funny, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think so. You’re just bored.”

“No, that _is_ funny. And anyway, I’m not tied up. Just half-naked and allowing you to look your fill.”

“I am _not_ —”

“You’re not going to prove it to me unless I take off this tie. You know already I’m ridiculous. Perhaps it’s time you learn I’m also incredibly vain. I’d be insulted if you weren’t taking this opportunity.”

“Well, be insulted, then.” She’s gruff now, annoyed. That means he was right. He smiles blithely in the direction of the rustling fabric. He finds himself wishing that he could get just a peak. Those miles of milky skin. Those freckles. She never wears clothing that accentuates her legs enough, and he has driven himself half-mad wondering what the play of her muscles under her skin would look like if she ever wore proper running shorts or leggings.

“The truth is…I trust you,” he says. “That’s why I let you do this.”

She is quiet. Even the rustling has stopped. He can hear her breathing. Donyse is back in the main store, ringing up a client, and the silence remains until she comes back into the room, breaking the tension between he and Brienne.

“Oh!” Donyse exclaims. “You were right!”

“Who was right?” Brienne asks.

“Jaime. He said you’d look stunning in blue!”

Jaime knows Brienne has turned her gaze on him, and so he smiles. His hands twitch at his side, eager to rip off his blindfold and see what Donyse has dressed Brienne in. He won’t, though. He’s not sure he has Brienne’s trust nearly as much as she has his, and he would do anything to avoid ruining what little he has managed to take for himself.

“I knew it would look well with your eyes,” he says. Brienne’s only answer is a single exhale. Sharp and confused. Jaime thinks of it, off and on, about a dozen times over the next few days.


	12. "Do you trust me?"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 12\. "Do you trust me?". Jaime and Brienne are roommates and friends with benefits, and Jaime has fallen in love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a tumblr prompt thing! I was prompted "Do you trust me?" but read the wrong number at first, so this ended up being both "do you trust me?" and "Friends with benefits and both people catching feelings"

“The thing about fucking your best friend is that nine times out of ten you only fuck them because you’re in love with them and you think they’re not in love with you.”

Tyrion delivers this sermon with the same half-drunk gravitas with which he says almost everything, and Jaime does his best to ignore him. Cersei laughs, which makes it more difficult. The only thing worse than Tyrion and Cersei being at each other’s throats is when they’re getting along for long enough turn their combined shittiness on him.

The worst part is that they’re in _his_ place, because it’s his turn to host the weekly Lannister Family Dinner (Dad Not Invited), so he can’t even show his displeasure by storming out.

“I never should have told you about it,” he mutters, his back to them as he stands at the oven and they continue to drink at his counter. Cersei snorts into her wine, and Tyrion affects an even _more_ serious air, and Jaime hates them both.

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Tyrion agrees. “You also should never have done it.”

_That_ makes Jaime stop and look over at his brother. Tyrion’s looking at him with an expression of real _pity_ , and it makes Jaime want to square his shoulders and stand up taller and say _fuck off, Tyrion_ , but he doesn’t. Because, gods. He feels pathetic enough already, and he knows Tyrion smells blood in the water.

“I’m handling it,” he says.

“You’re not,” Cersei sing-songs. “You’re sautéing like a man who’s trying to refrain from stabbing his very clever siblings.”

“Luckily for you, I don’t have any of those,” Jaime says, and Cersei laughs again, and Tyrion hums thoughtfully, which is worse.

* * *

When they finally leave, and he’s left alone with his thoughts, he flops back on the couch, sighing performatively for no one, because he has been living with the suspicion that this whole thing has been a mistake for _months_ , and it’s so like him to only _address_ that suspicion when someone else says something.

He has always been rather dependent on his siblings for pointing these things out to him. His ex, Addam, once told Jaime that he was the most emotionally illiterate man he’d ever met, “especially when it comes to yourself”. Which was maybe a damning thing to say, but not entirely unfair. It’s not that Jaime’s emotions are a total mystery to him. He doesn’t wander around, utterly unable to figure out what he’s feeling. Day to day, he does pretty well, and he’s good at picking up on the emotions of the people around him. After the childhood he had, he kind of _had_ to be. But the bigger things have a tendency to escape him until it’s nearly too late.

Which is exactly what happened with Brienne.

He knew they were best friends. _Has_ known it ever since they graduated and moved in together. He knew that he liked watching Brienne work out when they went to the gym together. He knew that he liked the way she was so well muscled, so obviously strong, built so differently from almost anyone he’d ever met. He knew, too, that he liked her softness and her sweetness and the guileless way she looked at him, never with hidden motives or cruelty or any of the other things he had been conditioned to expect by his family.

He knew those things, but until he kissed her for the first time, he had not understood what it meant.

By then, it was already too late. _Friends with benefits. No strings attached._ Seemed like a good bargain at the time until he kissed her and realized he loved her.

They’ve been fucking for months now, and it’s _the worst_ , because it’s the best, and it’s everything that Jaime never expected to want, let alone _have_. Brienne was shy the first few times. Hesitant and concerned that things were going to change, or that they were making a huge mistake. Jaime realized he was in love with her during that first kiss, because it was like that awful bullshit in all those romantic comedies where the characters insist that sparks have to _fly_ during that first kiss for it to be _right_ , or whatever. Jaime always hated those moments. Found them unrealistic. Too overwrought. But he kissed Brienne, and it was like being hit by a truck. Not physically, not just because she’s bigger than him and strong and can hold his weight and pushes back against him with the same strength with which he is pushing against her. But because she is _Brienne_ , and he kissed her and suddenly realized, _oh, of course. Of course. How could it have been anything else_?

Now that it has been months, he can look back and kind of figure out where it started. Somewhere after graduation, surely, when they moved in together and Jaime realized that he would be very content if they never moved out. Somewhere between tipsy celebrations for new jobs, and Brienne laughing at his attempts at renovation, and Brienne taking care of him when he was sick, and going to pet shelters to adopt a cat together, he fell in love with her. It must have been early on. It must have been before Addam, and Hyle, and all the weird, formless jealousy that came out of those relationships. The awkward tension between he and Brienne for those months when both of them were dating someone else and things just didn’t feel _right_.

Why didn’t he notice then? He still isn’t sure.

He’s noticing now, though, and that’s the problem. Ever since he noticed it, he hasn’t known a moment of _not_ noticing it when they’re together. He studies her with a kind of fascinated fury. _Why’d it take me so long? Obviously I love her_. Watching her make coffee in the morning. Watching her on the treadmill at the gym. Watching her laugh along with whatever movie they’re watching. Whole days go by when noticing it doesn’t make him hate himself for not noticing earlier, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone. He carries it inside him, and lives with it, and kisses her and fucks her and is fucked by her and makes her feel as good as he possibly can, like an apology for loving her when he knew that wasn’t part of the bargain.

* * *

“Are they gone?” Brienne calls, poking her head around the front door, like she ever would have come home from Renly’s if she thought there was a chance his siblings were still here. She generally gets along with both Tyrion and Cersei, to varying degrees, but ever since she started hooking up with Jaime, she’s made herself scarce when the three siblings are together. _They_ know, and _she_ knows they know, but she doesn’t want to talk about it with them, and Jaime thinks that’s fair. _He_ doesn’t want to talk about it with them either, and Brienne hasn’t spent a lifetime learning to equip herself against their bullshit.

“You’re safe,” Jaime says, grinning, and he sets down a plate for her at the counter. She puts her stuff away very neatly, the way she always does. It’s one of those things about her that annoys him. _Just put it down and eat! Put it away later!_ But even _that_ seems like love, sometimes. That there are things about her that annoy him so much, but he loves her anyway.

“How’d it go?” she asks.

“Fine. Dad called each of us, which was pretty funny. None of us answered.”

“How empowered of you all.”

“Ninety percent sure that Cersei called him the second she left, but yeah. It felt pretty good in the moment.”

Brienne smiles at him, the way she always does. She sits down and starts eating. Jaime has this pathetic urge to just stand at the other side of the counter and watch her, but he doesn’t. He goes about cleaning up the mess he’s made of the kitchen, keeping up an endless stream of chatter as Brienne eats, the way _he_ always does.

_Always._ It’s such a pathetic, awful word sometimes. Always, because Jaime has yet to make a move to change things. Always, because he could stay in this bubble forever, even if he’s so afraid that she’ll see the things he feels and will reveal that she can’t feel the same. Always, because he can’t seem to take a step forward or back, and it’s like to drive him mad eventually. Jaime has never been a man afraid of much. Not enough sense to be afraid, most of the time. Brienne said that to him, once, joking but not joking, the way she does sometimes. Jaime had laughed, because it was at least a little true. But he’s afraid now. He’s been afraid since he kissed her, and it’s been months of this now. Months of fear and longing and joy and desire all mixed up and fucking with him _constantly._

Brienne eats quickly, the way she always does. She helps him with the dishes. She laughs at his complaints about his siblings, which haven’t changed in all the years they’ve known each other. Gods, it’s a weird feeling, to want something so simple _this_ badly. They already live together. They’re already best friends. They’re already fucking. He wants to continue doing it just like this, _always_ , forever, but he wants her to know that he loves her, and he wants to be assured of her love in return. That’s it. Why is that so much to ask?

* * *

_“Do you trust me?”_

He had been the one to ask her, even though now that he looks back, it seems like it was a question he should have asked himself. _Do you trust yourself to do this? Do you think this will be enough? Are you really sure you’re ready?_

The answer to all three of those questions would have been a resounding _no_ , but Brienne’s answer had been an equally resounding _yes_ , and he still feels it, all these months later. _Yes_ , I trust you. _Yes_ , I’m willing to be vulnerable with you. It means more than he can say, and so he frequently doesn’t even try to. He tells her not in words, but in actions. Allowing her to see parts of himself that he has never shown anyone.

His friend. His _best_ friend.

_“It’s a terrible idea,”_ Tyrion said, when Jaime first told him, and maybe he was right. Maybe they’re _all_ right. Addam laughed heartily when Jaime told him. Cersei cackled. They’re all right, and Jaime’s just a fool who thought he was being clever up until the moment he realized he _couldn’t_.

_“Do you trust me?”_

Sometimes he hears the echo of it. They don’t fuck every night, but when they do, he hears it. He doesn’t think they’re going to fuck tonight, and he’s fine with that, he finds. Brienne looks tired, and she has that half-tense set to her shoulders that means she probably had an irritating day at work. Sometimes that puts her in a certain kind of mood—Jaime’s favorite kind of mood, honestly, because there’s nothing he likes better than being fucked by a Brienne who’s gentle but frustrated and needs some way to expend that energy—but Jaime can tell this isn’t one of those times. On those days, he can feel the energy roiling off her the moment she steps into the apartment. The want. He can usually tell what she’s thinking, and on those days he knows she’s thinking of fucking him. Putting on that harness, strapping into it, and fucking him until he’s needy and pliant and she’s not half as frustrated anymore. But tonight it’s just restlessness. Exhaustion. Something heavier he doesn’t quite understand.

He kisses her when he sees it. It’s weird. Leaving the kitchen on his way to the couch. Just a small, gentle kiss. He’s not even sure why. It’s not his style. He’s usually so good at anticipating her needs, only making a move when he’s sure she wants it, when he’s sure it will lead somewhere else. It’s just…after the dinner with his siblings, and after missing her, and after spending so much time today thinking about how _this_ , this very thing he’s doing, is such a mistake, he _needs_ to kiss her. He pauses long enough that she can turn him away if she wants, but she doesn’t. She’s leaning up against the kitchen counter, one eyebrow ticked up in a look of surprise. She knows how this works as well as he does, and she knows this is unusual, and he feels… _seen_. In a way he doesn’t like.

They’ve experimented more and more as the months have gone by and as Brienne has gotten confident in her own skin. She’s only ever dated one man—Hyle—and he was never very adventurous, and so for a while Jaime felt more like an instructor than a friend with benefits. Constantly introducing new concepts. New ideas. Laughing as she blushed redder and redder but then adopted that grim-faced look of determination he was already so used to as her friend. Until finally she was making moves of her own. Declaring what she wanted. Coming up with ideas of things that _she_ wanted to try. Months of it. _Months_ of teaching and learning and falling deeper, and yet a purposeless kiss surprises her, and it’s like they’re back at the beginning again.

“What’s wrong?” she asks him.

“Nothing,” he says. “I just wanted to kiss you.”

She frowns at that, and Jaime retreats to the living room, his face on fire, hearing the combined laughter of his siblings in his head.

* * *

“Jaime,” Brienne says, the next morning.

They didn’t fuck the night before, as Jaime had predicted they wouldn’t, and he spent half the night imagining what they would have done if they _had_ and half the night thinking he was a fucking idiot for kissing her, so he knows already when he hears that careful politeness in Brienne’s voice that he fucked up.

“Brienne,” he replies anyway, shittily, smiling and pretending like he has no idea that there’s anything for her to be wary about.

“We should talk.”

He’s been dreading this, actually. Dreading it, expecting it, almost _hoping_ for it, because he knows that he can’t keep doing this forever, and he always assumed that she would be the one to end it. Still, he knows he looks alarmed when he looks up from his phone and meets her eyes. Knows it because he _is_ alarmed, and knows it because _she_ looks alarmed, too, by his response.

“About what?” he asks.

“Boundaries.”

He sighs. He puts his phone down on the counter. He tries to get a read on her. She’s blank, which doesn’t help. But her eyes are expressive, and he sees…he isn’t sure what he sees. But it’s something wary. Guarded. He shouldn’t feel encouraged by that, but he _does_.

“Brienne,” he says. He wants to apologize. Tell her that it was a mistake. Tell her that they should stop this before it goes too far. He has such an instinct for self-protection when it comes to the bigger emotions he doesn’t fully understand. But…the look in her eyes. He stands up instead. He walks around the counter and stands in front of her. She’s leaning back against the sink, and they’re almost equal height like this. He steps in between her legs, looks at her. She shows nothing on her face. She doesn’t breathe faster. She doesn’t look trapped. She doesn’t grimace or tremble or do anything but _look_ at him, and still he can see so much. “You trust me, don’t you?” he asks.

“You know I do,” she answers. Her voice is deep, reassuring. Confused.

“I trust you too,” he says. She nods. He brings his hand up to her cheek, brushing his thumb over her freckles. Nothing about her wavers except for her eyes. He might be wrong. He might be way off base. But he _knows_ her. His best friend. The woman he loves. He knows her better than he knows himself, but he knows himself _enough_ now. If she tells him she wants to stop, he will, and he will swallow back his feelings, and he will hide them, and she will never know, because he is the kind of creature who refuses to be vulnerable, and who will withdraw and lick his wounds. And they will go on forever without either of them knowing.

It’s possible that she wants boundaries because he has gotten too close and that isn’t what she wants. That’s what he thought as recently as yesterday: that this arrangement is all she wants from him. His body and his friendship but not his heart. He thought that it was enough for her. It’s possible that it’s _too much_ for her, and that’s why she’s looking at him now like she’s overwhelmed, like she isn’t sure what she wants him to do next. He steps back, because he cannot say this when he’s touching her, he doesn’t think.

“I love you,” he says. He says it baldly, unreservedly, like he’s just a person who _says_ things. He’s not! He’s a person who talks around things, and makes shitty jokes that barely hide his true feelings, and never, ever speaks directly. She’s similar to him in that regard, even though it looks different from the outside. She’s quiet. Reserved. Blank. She’s so good at keeping things from people when she wants to be. She hides it all away, and she never lets it show, and it’s only because he knows her so well that he has gotten better at seeing below the surface. Sometimes he thinks that the same must be true for her. She must have learned him better at some point. Come to understand him. But maybe not. There is still so much hidden behind her eyes, and he cannot think of any other reason why she would be so determined to hide.

“What?” she asks. There’s no hiding her astonishment now, and Jaime tries not to feel frightened by it.

“I love you,” he says again. She closes her eyes and holds her hand up to ward him off, like she doesn’t want to hear him say it again. So he doesn’t say it. Just waits. Part of trusting her is trusting that she won’t hurt him too badly if this is the opposite of what she wants. So he doesn’t qualify his love with anything. Doesn’t try to change the subject, or step back. He has passed a point of no return, he is sure, and he isn’t interested in going back.

“What do you mean by that?” she asks.

“I mean I’m _in love with you_. Is that plain enough?”

“No! It isn’t!” Brienne glares at him with a ferocity he has seen a hundred times when they argue or when they go to the gym together and they’re competing against each other. Absurdly, the mere sight of her annoyance has him half hard already, and he laughs. He feels…great, actually. Like a secret has been lifted. No matter what she says, no matter what she does. He has told her.

“Tyrion said to me, last night,” he says, suddenly realizing what has caused all this. This feeling of an incompleteness inside him. This certainty. This boldness. “He said that nine times out of ten, the reason you start fucking your best friend is because you’re in love with them, and you don’t think they love you back.”

“Jaime, that’s…”

“I know. Taking advice from Tyrion. Always a risk. But he wasn’t wrong, for me.” She’s quiet at that, watching him. He forces himself to meet her eyes, keep them. “And I figured nine out of ten…pretty good odds that you feel the same.”

“He pulled those stats out of his ass,” Brienne says, but there is something wild and unreserved in her tone. She doesn’t smile, or laugh, or deflect, or tell him what she’s thinking, but Jaime still knows. She crosses the short distance between them, and she takes his face in her hands, and she kisses him, and she presses him back against the counter so hard that it digs into his lower back, and he allows the thrill of it to tingle up and down his arms, racing over his skin, without trying to dampen it or laugh it away.

_I trust you._ Her fingers are in his hair, curling into a fist, and he whimpers into her mouth and kisses her harder, and it’s just like all those times at the gym where they compete against one another, except now he’s touching her. She was so gentle and hesitant those first few times. Like she wasn’t sure yet what her body was capable of when it came to sex. She knew what it was capable of at the gym, and when running, and when obliterating a punching bag, but sex was something new. Like learning a new skill, or learning to ride a bike, or rollerblade, or fucking horseback riding. Now she’s so confident it makes his breath catch. They fumble and feel and spin each other around, and finally he ends up flopped back on the couch, just like last night, except now she’s leaning over him, her hands on either side of his head, and she’s looking down at him. He has a feeling she’s half angry with him. She’s looking at him like she is, her lip slightly curled.

“You’re in love with me,” she says. A challenge.

“Do you trust me?” he asks her, again, knowing that she does. She laughs. It catches in her throat. _I love you too_ , it says, though he knows she won’t speak the words yet. But he trusts her; he knows they’ll come in time. He arches up to capture her mouth with his, and he kisses her, and she lets him.


End file.
